Besides, the young man is right:

“educating children on how to protect themselves and their privacy are the first problems I’d fix.”

Speaking of which, I just read this from danah boyd, on Controlling Your Public Appearance. Some good stuff. http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/09/07/controlling_you.html

My other question is - do we have any research that backs up the claim that educating students will work better than filters? I was one of those teachers that tried to educate my students about this stuff, and it never seemed to work for me.

When I was a kid, we had the same attitude towards the closed campus - educate us on how to be safe off campus, instead of keeping us from leaving campus during lunch. Did I listen to any of this education? Nope. I was just basically saying “give me some lessons that I will just nod my head to, so that you can feel good about what you are doing, and then let me run a muck to do what I want during lunch.” Man, the crazy stuff I did during high school lunch off campus…. (after being “educated”)

And, I’m sorry students - you aren’t that much more clever than admins. They are giving you some freedoms to not totally ruin your web surfing experience. I am not an admin person, nor am I totally in favor of filters, but I know that they can clamp down your surfing enough to keep you off of sites they don’t want you on. The reason they don’t, I am told, is because we “really, really, REALLY wouldn’t like it.” If you hack past those controls, it is because you are taking advantage of the freedoms they are giving you - not because you have found some hole in the filter.

The problem with filters is that the Internet is not very well tagged or labeled. Require labeling, and all filters would work easily. If I don’t want to accidentally see appalling images of torture, I should have the right to keep that from EVER showing up on my computer. That should be my right as a web surfer. However, certain industries know that this system will cut back on their revenue, because they rely so heavily on covert bait and catch schemes to hook people on their content. Therefore, they turn the issue of tagging their content into a free speech issue. Which is clearly isn’t.

My second response was to bookmark your TechLearning post so I can use Meebo when I’m at work. I use Yahoo IM for my office hours (I teach four online classes at a community colllege) and yet I can’t have it open when I’m in my *real* office hours if I’m on the wireless network.

My third response was to hope that these young hackers are posting how they’re doing these things so I can find it.

My most recent experience with a filter was with Google images. I had deliberately put on the strongest filter, and my search brought up appalling images of torture victims (no, I don’t remember what I was searching for, but it wasn’t that). A mindset that brings up this image and doesn’t let me talk to my students I have trouble buying in to.