An opportunity to visit BETT recently enabled me to take a look at a number of approaches to Internet safety. This was particularly good timing in relation to the recent announcement from Senator Conroy to establish filtering for all Australian Internet users in order to protect a (very important) sub-set of Australian Internet users. Firstly, the protection of our children is paramount. In my own case, safety of our kids at school was probably more important than potential academic performance when we started looking at schooling options for them.
However, when it comes to Internet safety I am not sure that a sledgehammer approach to filtering the entire country is the best way forward. We have seen before and we will see again how easy it is for those who want to, to bypass filtering. To me, the Internet is just too dynamic to pin our hopes on such a coarse solution. Our language and the context in the way concepts are presented make filtering incredibly difficult. Here’s an interesting article on Crikey showing at a simple level, just how difficult it is.
Putting a wall around something to protect it is a medieval solution and I hope we live in more enlightened times. If you believe walls are a good protection measure then placing them closer to the assets you are trying to protect seems to make more sense than building a wall far away. Most, if not all of the filtering solutions that I looked at were local solutions ie at the school level rather than the country level. Local solutions potentially give teachers more opportunity to intervene when the inevitable breach occurs.
While filtering will no doubt play an important role in this area, it does not come close to protecting students from all potential harm via the Internet. For example, it does not stop things such as cyber-bullying, predatory behaviour in online messaging/communications services, or simply wandering ‘off-task’ and accessing content that is not harmful, but not subject related. Clearly other approaches need to be implemented to address these problems. There are some interesting technical solutions appearing which start to address these areas by capturing what is on the screens in realtime and allowing intervention as and when the incidents occur. Still, this only starts to address the problem by allowing teachers to intervene straight away and take appropriate action. More important still though is educating our students and giving them the ability to protect themselves from harm. In the ‘real’ world, we don’t protect them simply by shutting the rest of the world off from them, but give them the skills they need to survive and thrive safely in that world. So it should be in the ‘online’ world.
Fenced off societies do not seem to work - think of any that you know of and ask yourself if they are really looking after the interests of their citizens in the best way. At the very least, we should have the right to opt into that environment than opt out of it - that may appease the civil libertarian concerns a bit.
Cheers,
Jerry.
technorati tags: filtering
Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back