Hi Howard,
I can give you my opinion on this.
The people who should decide what is blocked should be the information
professionals -- those who have the greatest amount of professional
development and experience in making decisions about the appropriateness of
material for students -- hmm, does that sound like I am talking about
library media specialists?
Further, when the US Supreme Court ruled that CIPA was constitutional it was
very clear that two key swing votes on this case voted to support the
constitutionality of CIPA because of the presumption that if the filter was
inappropriately blocking access to a site, it could be *promptly* overridden
to provide access.
Therefore, in addition to ensuring that information professionals are in
charge of decisions about what categories to block ALL of the district's
information professionals should have the authority and ability to
immediately override the filter and make their own assessment about whether
or not to provide immediate access to a student. Filtering systems do have a
way to record the exercise of such overrides and this reporting capability
should be sufficient prevention for any misuse.
Howard, if you are willing to provide me or LMNet with the name of your
filtering product and the categories that are currently blocked, I would be
willing to express a personal opinion on this. Some filtering companies are
doing some interesting things with some of the categories.
In my personal opinion, it is far past time for school districts to
recognize and respect the expertise of their information professionals and
to remove responsibility for filtering decisions from technical services
personnel.
Feel free to quote me on this and feel free to forward this message to those
who need to understand.
--
Nancy Willard, M.S., J.D.
Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use
http://csriu.org
http://cyberbully.org
nwillard@csriu.org
Cyberbullying and Cyberthreats: Responding to the Challenge of Online Social
Cruelty, Threats, and Distress, a resource for educators, is now available
online at http://cyberbully.org.
Cyber-Safe Kids, Cyber-Savvy Teens: Helping Young People Use the Internet
Safely and Responsibly. Jossey-Bass (forthcoming)
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