Internet Filtering is Class Warfare

Boy, as I was doing a lit­tle research on this topic I have dis­cov­ered to my delight that it is one that is often dis­cussed and that many edu­ca­tional thinkers out there share my opin­ion about the over reach­ing aspect of inter­net fil­ter­ing. Much has been writ­ten recently about the topic and just recently @rmbyrne set up a wik­i­space try­ing to col­lect suc­cess sto­ries of edu­ca­tors who have had any luck with peel­ing back the dig­i­tal curtain.

In my school I have come to the real­iza­tion that the inter­net fil­ter and the abil­ity to over­ride the fil­ter result in an ad-hoc caste sys­tem among the fac­ulty result­ing in resent­ment among the ‘dig­i­tal untouch­ables’. When a web­site is blocked the user sees a black screen con­tain­ing some lan­guage about edu­ca­tion law, the cat­e­gory of the site that has been blocked and a link to over­ride the page and bypass the fil­ter. At first only admin­is­tra­tion had the codes to over­ride the fil­ter, but even­tu­ally out of neces­sity cer­tain teach­ers were also given the keys to the dig­i­tal king­dom. These teach­ers were usu­ally peo­ple who were viewed for one rea­son or another as tech­nol­ogy lead­ers in the build­ing or the dis­trict (I was included as one of these). Even­tu­ally what hap­pened was that these few teach­ers would give another teacher their codes so that they could go about their teach­ing with­out the encum­brance of the fil­ter. Soon con­ver­sa­tions could be over­heard in the teacher’s room like: “how were YOU able to use that YouTube video, when I try it is blocked”. It wasn’t that my fel­low code hold­ers and I were try­ing to exclude our col­leagues, but that was what was hap­pen­ing, and the peo­ple who needed the access the most (the stu­dents) were left out completely.

Recently I have begun a dia­logue with my admin­is­tra­tion about these issues and to their credit they have seemed very recep­tive. I am hop­ing to abol­ish this dig­i­tal divide here by the end of the year.