That said, here are a few thoughts that spring to mind …

1) Mistaken (or otherwise) display of a porn site on a Primary school computer would set that school’s ICT effort back years. Thus outright blocking of all but whitelisted websites has considerable merit.

2) Dealing with what to do, how to react, who to tell - when a pupil comes across porn or racist or other websites - is a hugely important modern skill - one that should be taught

3) Dealing with emerging media, technology communications tools, being critical of media content, perspective, motivation, audience etc. are hugely important skills. Burying one’s head in the sand or blanket banning does nothing to help pupils with these essential modern skills.

4) I wish that the Department of Education would harness the enthusiasm, motivation and fun associated with social networking websites - and use this as a publishing tool for schools

5) In any case, the Department have not given schools (Primary at least) any money for software since 2001, any money for harware (apart from broadband project) since 2002 nor any money for technical support - ever! So Windows95 and Windows98 machines (unless you’re in a middle-class, collecting tokens etc. area) are creaking with viruses / spyware /32Mb of Ram etc.

I’ve called for €800million to cover Primary school for the period 2002 to 2008 (cf. http://www.pedablogy.com/2006/03/ireland-mappa-mundi-approach-to.htm) in order to fund an equipment refresh, as well as help reform to a connectionist curriculum and provide realistic professional development for teachers who, like our minister for Education, are years behind our pupils in terms of technology savoir. With extra money in the kitty at the moment, investment in education seems an obvious choice - but the DES (Dept of Education and Science) seem more concerned with spin and Press releases proclaiming what a wonderful job they are doing.

A revolutionary approach such as this would enable ireland to gain great advantage economically in the years ahead. An evolutionary approach will simply ensure things stay as they are - outdated and increasingly useless in a modern world. And finally, the most dangerous approach, is the DESolutionary approach - simply do nothing

Ireland is already 10 years behind the western world in computer, and internet access, this just reinforces that propagation of ignorance that is holding Ireland back. The real goal of teachers is to lift up the students so that can soar above them as best they can. They shouldn’t be clamping on anchors.

Treasa - I do believe it is possible to filter out almost all unsavoury sites while leaving in the rest of the Internet. I think the option chosen by the NCTE (ban everything) was the easy option for them but is detrimental to the students trying to learn from the Internet - the vast majority of which will now be unavailable to them. I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree.

You are correct in your observation on my emphasis - I was writing this post quickly this morning after listening to the piece on morning Ireland. It was only after posting it that I thought about the significance of the blocking of all the sites.

Twenty -

To be honest I’d be more inclined to think kids that don’t have access to shite like Bebo are at an advantage to those who do.

I see what you’re saying; I just don’t agree. Lots of things are detrimental to the education of children - but limited internet access can be seen in several different ways, and not all of them are negative in my opinion. In other words, your argument appears to amount to “it’s bad not to have internet because everyone should have internet” and I don’t see an answer to the question “why”, particularly with respect to school networks. It still remains the case that they will have internet access at school, just that the number of sites concerned will be limited. The extent of those limits will probably broaden with time as most things do as wrinkles get ironed out. This is the case in every single organisation I have worked in. Amongst the sites which I cannot access at work at the moment is mainframe.typepad.com. Given what I do, that’s borderline hilarious.

Are you suggesting that internet access in schools should be completely untrammelled?

That being said, we have problems with education in this country at levels where internet access does not make a difference.

1) high levels of illiteracy
2) major problems with numeracy
3) major behavioural problems/discipline problems
4) access for disadvantaged children to education as it stands.

The overwhelming impression I get from debates on education in this country is that *all* this will be fixed by technology. It will not.

In summary, I’m of the opinion that internet access is not the ultimate tool of education - there are tools that children require to make it work which are a good deal more important, such as reading, such as programming, such as maths, into which we’re not putting a huge amount of attention. I’m of the opinion that people providing access to the internet via a private network are entitled to limit that access to purposes for which they deem it necessary. If you told me that the relevant authorities were going to block all sites they deemed non-educational to all internet users in the country, then yes I’d say you have a point.

Lastly

many of the comments to this post have been focussing on the social networks being blocked by schools and while I think that is an important story, I think it is far more important that from September all schools will have a content filtering system in place which will block ALL sites unless they are specifically deemed to be educational.

Your technorati tags focus solely on social networks, and in your entry above, you focused solely on the fact that you considered it necessary for children to learn to use social networks effectively. I think it’s fair to say that you did make that emphasis. Not that I want to argue with you over it; it’s just an observation.

You may find these links useful:

Letter to schools regarding current filtering options. Via the Teachers Centre website. This is the official letter sent to all schools regarding content filtering.

Fortinet the company who currently provide the filtering.

This system has been place for the last year to provide content filtering for schools using the Dept of Education broadband. Under this system Bebo and MySpace are currently blocked with both A and B filtering options. However the A option allows a far broader range of access than “educational and related” suggests.

In practice the NCTE suggests that schools choose option A as option B is next to useless, blocking even access to Google in some cases. If a site is blocked and is not categorised by Fortinet it is possible to submit it directly from to them for rating. Info here.

So, no, I would not block this site.

The problem that I see Treasa is that from September this site (and hundreds of millions of even more educational sites) will be blocked for no good reason. I would respectfully suggest, that this will be to the detriment of the education of the students.

You’re underselling yourself if you think the site is not educational. So, no, I would not block this site. The problem is that while I think sites about and how to do social networking, where it comes from and how it developed are educational, the social and networking sites themselves, such as Bebo, myspace, and to a lesser extent, even flickr are not.

On the other hand, my own site is not really educational despite people’s efforts to write theses on French road legislation from my comments on Ouest-France reports.

So I assume the issue here is that I probably have a different sense of what could be considered educational than you do, and that is why I am not so worried about this.

how do you define what is an educational website and what is not?

Is tomrafteryit.net an educational website? In most instances I would imagine not but for any child who is tasked with doing a project on blogging, or podcasting or web 2.0 applications, for instance it could be considered educational.

Would you block this site Treasa?

The point of a school is to educate children; it’s not to be an ISP for them. It’s almost an emotional response to say that the net effect is to deny children access to the internet. It denies them access to certain - many - sites, not deemed necessary to educate them at school and only at school. But the school pretty much is not and should not be a child’s sole access to the outside world.

To some extent, I support the schools’ right to do this and I am strongly of the opinion that if parents wanted their children to have far broader access to the internet, it is up to them to provide and manage it. The question of digital haves and digital have nots is a social issue, not so much an educational issue.

However, the blocking of ALL sites by the content filter except those deemed to be educational? Personally, I think that’s outrageous! That is basically, denying children access to the Internet. 99.99% of Google search results will be blocked. It will be useless. How are kids supposed to do any project research, for example?

Obviously I can’t predict what the filters are going to be like, but that not withstanding, if I had children, I would be filtering their use of the internet on my computers also. Schools have a great deal of responsibilities, for which they are given few tools. For obvious reasons, computers accessed by children have to have some filtering. How well do you think it would go down if kids are accessing pornographic content on a school networked computer?

Is there any major difference between that and the various IT misson statements around the place that block access to various sites - in my case, including typepad hosted sites - for people inside company networks? Most companies have an IT policy which states “Internet browsing must be for business purposes only”.

Life operates within a series of frameworks. We have problems with education in this country, namely, the erosion of what education is about.