Dick Sblog

Futurelab’s ‘Flux‘ blog carries a recent piece by Ben Kirkland entitled “Website Blocking: bear hunts, battlefronts and missed opportunities?” in which he laments the use of blocking software in schools. He points out that this stops teachers and pupils accessing a wide range of useful materials and prevents them engaging in the use of social networking tools that are common outside the school gates. He restates the obvious, which is that out of school kids are exposed to risks all the time they are in the online world, as in any other environment, and he ends on the need for kids to have the experience necessary to learn how to manage those risks.

This is an issue close to my heart and goes back to around 1997 when my colleagues and I at South Bristol Learning Network developed the Signal Box. This was a piece of kit into which you plugged your network and your connectivity (the days of whole schools on 28.8 modems or 64kbpm lease lines at £11k p.a!) and it enabled you to time-limit the internet access for individuals or groups of students. They could use the time all at once or in increments, as they chose, and would then come back to ask for more, allowing the teacher to check their browsing history, take a look at what they had been doing and help them learn the skills of focused, safe  Internet browsing. This seemed enough to us but to keep our school development partners happy, we had to introduce a mechanism for selective blocking of websites.

Over a meal one day I was explaining this piece of kit to my colleague, Stellan Ranebo from Sweden. He was utterly astonished that such blocking facilities were necessary. I explained that in prurient UK there was a need to reassure parents and teachers that kids didn’t get access to unsavoury (ie porn) sites. His response was that in Sweden they educated children to deal with the issues around pornography, recognising that their exposure to that genre was inevitable.

And here we are, years later, in much the same situation. The mainstream educational world tries to erect digital fences around its pupils to keep them away from the Internet snakes. Unfortunately, the fences aren’t long enough, high enough or of small enough mesh size. Rather than keeping the kids away from the snakes, sufficiently motivated members of both parties can work their way through the fence, walk around to the end or jump over.  And, of course, when they go online at home, the fences aren’t there anyway.

This is plainly stupid, we’re not doing our young people any favours by trying to isolate them from risk. They need to learn risk recognition and management strategies that will stand them in good stead at school, at home and in work. Quite apart from anything else, the social networking tools that are widely banned in schools are now the routine currency of the world of work.

Take down the fences and help kids learn to deal with snakes.