Archive for August, 2007
How effective are filters? Ask Australia
So I posted a few days ago on TechLearning about how easy it is becoming for students to bypass school filters in a very wide variety of ways. Yes, in the post I did mention a few ways that people could bypass school or work filters. I didn’t do this to teach people how, I did it to raise awareness amongst educators and to point out that simply filtering the internet is insufficient. Filters don’t protect our students, educating them does.
It didn’t take long after I posted it for a student of David Jakes’ to leave a comment.
While our district users extensive filtering on web sites that we students can access, even the most basic users know how to get around them by using any one of thousands of web proxies …
Aside from a strict whitelist of web sites–which would be disastrous for a learning environment–there’s not much [network administrators] can do that students can’t get around with extreme ease.
Sorry to be so pessimistic, admins, but we’re just *that* clever.
Think he’s just bragging? Then take a look at this story out of Australia (credit to JINXIE for sharing it): Student cracks $84m porn filter. It seems that Australia decided to throw money at the problem. They invested $84 million dollars in a complex filtering system to try to keep students away from porn sites. It took a 16 year old 30 minutes to bypass it. So the government added another filter to take care of the security hole. The same teenager was able to bypass the new addition within 40 minutes.
So what did this hooligan have to say for himself?
“Filters aren’t addressing the bigger issues anyway,” he said.
“Cyber bullying, educating children on how to protect themselves and their privacy are the first problems I’d fix.
“They really need to develop a youth-involved forum to discuss some of these problems and ideas for fixing them.”
What a radical idea. I wonder whether they could have developed such a forum or educational program for less than $84 million dollars…
High Tech? More like highly nostalgic
Hall Davidson loaned me a book that he thought I’d like, John Sandford’s The Empress File. I gotta admit that I’m enjoying it, but a big part of the pleasure is that it’s about a high tech hacker using cutting edge technology… Oh yeah, did I happen to mention that the book was written in 1991?
Some of the phrases in the book that have gotten me all misty eyed include:
I had two computers on the boat. One was a top-of-the-line 486 with enough hard-disk space to store the complete denials of Richard M. Nixon.
Heh. I’m pretty sure that I carry at least 5 devices that have that much memory on me at all times.
I also carried a laptop with built-in hard-disk and a telephone modem
Whoa! Both a hard drive and a telephone modem! Heh, do computers even come with telephone modems anymore? I don’t think my last 3 or 4 have.
Can’t find the passage, but the other line that stood out was when he referred to a PC as an “IBM clone.” It’s been a long time since every single PC was considered to be a clone of the all powerful IBM. Also he mentions looking through someone’s computer, and he found “two applications, a word processor and a spreadsheet, but no data.” Aaahhhhh, the good ol’ days. You could store programs, or you could store data, but there wasn’t enough space to store both!
I remember my first computer was a Kaypro 10. A monster of a ‘laptop’ with a teeny tiny little green screen that could only display characters. Wasn’t very powerful, could only run a few programs, but it had a modem and that opened up an entirely new world to me. Ddials, BBS’s, and a seemingly unlimited supply of information.
Anybody else taking a trip down memory lane right now?
Social Networking: The Good, the Bad, and the NSBA
96% of students with online access have used social networking technologies. 71% have done it in the last 7 days.
Well now, isn’t that a fun way to kick off a report on social networking amongst students? The NSBA has completed a study of 1277 9-17 year old students, 1039 parents and 250 district leaders who make the policies for their schools. The report was sent out to the media a week or two ago, but was just released officially today. Are bloggers media? Based on how many have already reviewed the study, I’d have to say we certainly think we are!
You should definitely read the report for yourself. It’s sure to be a hot topic of conversation for years to come (people are still quoting the PEW study from 2005 about teen internet use), and this one definitely has some tasty, controversial nuggets in it.
For example, “Only .08% of all students say they’ve actually met someone in person from an online encounter without their parents’ permission.” For those of you that aren’t mathematically inclined, that’s a really small number. Compared to the number of news stories we hear about internet predators, it really forces you to start to put things in perspective. I’m not saying that we can ignore internet predators, or that they aren’t more evil than internet spammers, but there aren’t an army of faceless millions who are trying to steal our children through the use of MySpace. I was surprised to read that only 1 in 14 students had experienced cyberbullying. I would have expected that number to be far higher, but perhaps that’s just because the media reporting of those incidents have warped my sense of proportion.
Aside from predators and safety, the report had some interesting things to say about the role of social networking in students’ lives. “Nearly half of [district leaders] expect social networking sites to introduce students to ‘new and different kinds of students.’ More than 4 in 10 hope social networking will help students ‘learn to express themselves better creatively’ and ‘develop globa relationships.’” The numbers from the parents are even higher. 3 in 4 parents think that social networking sites could actually improve their students educational and conflict resolution skills. About the same number think it can improve their students’ social skills. That’s a pretty strong statement about the parents expectations.
Of course, the question then becomes, could students get access to those sites even if they wanted to? 85% of district leaders insist that adult monitoring would be required for students to use these sites, and 71% would still prohibit chat and IM. So we want students networking, but we don’t want them communicating? Something has to give there. Even if people start designing EduFriendly versions of all these tools, it won’t stop students from going on their own to where the masses are.
The report does have some positive messaging to convey in it’s conclusion.
Many schools initially banned or restricted Internet use, only to ease up when the educational value of the Internet became clear. The same is likely to be the case with social networking. Safety policies remain important, as does teaching students about online safety and responsible online expression — but students may learn these lessons better while they’re actually using social networking tools.
After reading through the report, I got curious as to how many teachers actually had access to these sorts of tools right now. I did a very informal survey on Twitter, a TwitterPoll, and asked people whether their school had blocked access to Blogger, Flickr, YouTube, FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, Ning or Meebo. You can see the results in the chart below. Twitter, Ning, Blogger and Flickr are the only sites that were unblocked more often than they were blocked. And unsurprisingly, Facebook and MySpace were blocked by the most districts. However, what did surprise me was how many districts blocked Meebo! Definitely supports the findings of the NSBA report.
As I bring this post to a close, I leave you with one question to think about: If social networking is a good thing, and students should be learning how to use those sites appropriately, at what grade level should students have access to an unfiltered internet?
Why I *heart* Bluehost for the Nth time
Teach42.com. Dembo.org down. Life was absolutely miserable. I upgraded, I backed up, I reinstalled, I Google’d, I scoured support forums, but I couldn’t figure out what the heck was wrong with my poor blogs!
SO, I finally broke down and called Bluehost. I don’t like calling for support. People call ME for support, I don’t call others. BUT, sometimes you just gotta admit that your beat and call in the big guns. So I called them up.
For the first time, i didn’t get right through to a person. I got placed in a call queue. While I wasn’t thrilled about that, it was a Sunday evening, and they did have a message letting me know where I stood in line. “There are 8 people ahead of you. There are 6 people ahead of you. There are 3 people ahead of you. Hello, thank you for calling Bluehost. How can I help you?”
Want to know why I hate calling for support? Because most of the time when you call in the first thing they ask you is, “Let’s start off by rebooting your computer.” They assume you know nothing, and they refuse to believe that you’ve already spent 2.5 days doing tests of your own to narrow down symptoms and identify the exact issues. So they start you off at the basics.
Not so at Bluehost. I explained the symptoms, in particular emphasizing the strangeness that it occurred to two separate blogs at the same time, running different versions of WordPress. He verified a few things I had said and put me on hold. Three minutes later he came back on the line, told me it was because I’d turned on some sort of hi speed caching for my account and it was screwing everything up. I don’t get it, but he turned it off and everything started working again. Easy breezy!
Not only are they a bargain, not only do they make doing just about anything incredibly easy, but their support kicks butt. Bluehost rocks.
If you want to set up your own wiki, blog, email, ecommerce, Drupal, Joomla, Moodle, bulletin board, gallery, chat room, or just about anything else, I can’t recommend Bluehost more highly. They rock.