Teachers Teaching Teachers #95 – Locating the Tyranny of Filtering – 03.12.08

It’s happening in small, geographically dispersed schools in rural Alaska. Three people are responsible for doing it
for over a million public school students in New York City. An
independent school in Milwaukee uses the same software that is being
used in NYC to do it. In Colorado, an outspoken opponent of it
was recently hired for a district level job, and now he is on a small
committee that gives the thumbs up or down. In North Dakota, a secret
password is emailed each week to a group of thirty teachers who can
then undo it in their schools,
when needed. In rural Virginia, a teacher carefully measures her
arguments for the educational benefit against the possible risks each
time she requests for it to be undone. Because so many schools do it
in so many different ways, the developers of VoiceThread have to work
overtime to keep their Web 2.0 tool available in public schools.

In September, Wesley Fryer "observed from China that the level of content filtering / censorship enforced by the central,
totalitarian government was actually LESS severe than the content
filtering enforced in many U.S. public schools" (Content filtering in Communist China versus an Oklahoma school » Moving at the Speed of Creativity).

Really? Do the descriptions in the first paragraph accurately represent
the tyranny of filtering in U.S. schools today? Or do teachers have
more power than we often exercise? It’s become too easy for educators
to represent filtering as if it’s something that oppresses us. What if
we find that the enemy is us?

From the discussion captured on this podcast, we can sketch a much more
complicated picture of how filtering really seems to work in U.S. schools. See what we mean by clicking Read more, below.

• Woody Woodgate is a one of nine local "site techs" in his district in Alaska.
  Since the distance between these schools makes it difficult for the
  district tech administrator to get around to all nine schools, the
  site techs have access to the filter. When a teacher needs to change it
  he or she finds the site tech in the building and requests a site to be
  unblocked.
• In New York City, it
  turns out that one of the three people managing the filter for over a
  million public school students has been a friend of alternative,
  progressive education in the city for many years. Olgierd Bilanow,
  now a system engineer for the
  NYC Department of Education, agreed to have a public conversation on
  this podcast about how the filter works in NYC, and how he sees his
  partnerships
  with teachers. Olgierd and his colleagues have almost never turned down
  a request from a school to have a filtering category (e.g. social
  networks) opened up. However he also points out that he has more
  requests to block sites and categories from schools than he has to
  unblock them.
• At Matt Montagne’s independent school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,
  teachers merely have to send an email or make a call to a help desk to
  get a category or a site opened. Filtering doesn’t seem to be a problem
  at Matt’s school, although he still wonders what it would be like to
  not have a filter at all.
• Bud Hunt is still
  critical of any school or teacher who wants to use filtering to control
  students or to avoid problems with what students might do on the
  Internet. However, Bud still remembers the mixture of embarrassment and
  frustration he used to feel when he was a teacher and one of his
  students or he would hit on a blocked site, but he has also seen
  blocking from the central district’s point of view, now that he works
  for the district as an "instructional technologist." Bud sits on a committee of four people in a school district in northern Colorado
  which approves or disapproves requests from teachers to unblock or to
  block particular web sites. Bud never votes to block a site. Bud’s
  advice: Find out who is doing the filtering. They’re probably
  frustrated with the filter too!
• As the District Technology Coordinator for a school district in North Dakota, Craig Nansen
  manages the filter for all schools in North Dakota from a central
  office. Craig says that North Dakota’s filter is user friendly for all
  of the schools. All a teacher has to do is give Craig a call and a site
  can be unblocked in about 30 minutes. Craig also provides a password to
  teachers each week so that they can turn the filter off when they need
  to during the day.
• Ben Papell and the other good folks at VoiceThread realized that filtering would eventually make it impossible for teachers to use their tool in the classroom. They created a protected space, Ed.VoiceThread where teachers would monitor their students, and where we could argue that because it is educational material, it should be unfiltered.
• In rural Virginia, Lee Baber
  has formed a strong, trusting relationship with the IT guys in her
  district. They have learned to trust her requests because she always
  backs them up with strong arguments about the educational value of
  opening any particular site. They also know that she will moderate the
  students work online.

It’s true that these seven examples — and the conversation with these
people that you can hear on this podcast — provide little more than
anecdotal evidence, but at least it’s enough to begin to question the
typical picture of filtering in U.S. schools.

Maybe it’s time to start singing with Joe Hill: Don’t Morn-Organize!

See more responses to this podcast at http://teachersteachingteachers.org/?p=162#comments