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April 18, 2006
The Word that Will Get Your Blog Censored by Texas Schools Districts
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The word that will get your blog banned in certain school districts, displayed as an image so that the filters won't be able to read it. |
Wes writes:
Are we living in the United States here, or totalitarian China? This is something we should be really concerned about as educators and citizens. I have titled this blog post "censored for relevance" because that is what I think is taking place here. Should educators be talking about social networking sites like MySp@ce? Of course. They should be reading blogs about MySp@ce, blogging themselves about MySp@ce, and even visiting MySp@ce. I think educators (even principals) should even create and maintain their own MySp@ce websites. I have started. [Me too, Wes.] Why?Simply put, because as educators we should strive to remain relevant to students and engaged in their development of literacy skills. Social networking websites are going to continue to grow FAST in the months and years to come. We need to help students make better decisions about the information they share about themselves online, in MySpace and elswhere. In some cases, it is hard to speak intelligently about something if you have little personal experience about it yourself. I am not talking about illegal drug use here-- I am talking about blogging and use of social networking sites. And blogging is not a short term trend. This is a world-changing phenomenon.
As Miguel notes on his blog, important educational blogs like Wesley's site and the techLEARNING blog are getting censored arbitrarily because they are trying to raise awareness about sites like MySp@ce, encouraging critical examinations by educators and a greater emphasis on media literacy. To engage in a constructive debate about sites like this, you have to mention them. And preferably link to them. And these acts are getting bloggers banned by schools.
While I strongly am against any form of censorship, I am thoroughly disgusted by school districts that allow their filters to prevent educators from engaging in professional discourse. I have lost track of the number of times that I've posted a message to my WWWEDU discussion list and received a bunch of autoreplies from school districts saying that teachers there won't be reading my post because they contain "inappropriate content." Usually, these posts have to do with cases of school filtering censorship, controversial sites like MySp@ce or other media literacy-related challenges faced by the modern educator. The filtering software used to supposedly protect children is preventing educators from taking an active role in understanding and discussing the complexities of Internet use in the classroom. Schools may claim "in loco parentis" when describing filters used to protect children. But what are they trying to protect teachers from? Being better users of technology? Being responsible, informed educators?
Miguel, meanwhile, has issued a call to arms against these practices. He's asking educational bloggers to deliberately put the word MySp@ce.com in their blog (with the correct spelling) so that more blogs will be blocked arbitrarily, thus raising the stakes against the school districts that have adopted these foolish filtering practices. Miguel writes:
I encourage you to ask EVERY one you know to put the word "MySp@ce.com" on EVERY web site of importance, from educational sites to mapping sites to critical resources teachers and administrators use. I hope that by doing so, the outcry against banning words--not just URLs--will be so great as to cause education leaders to reconsider their decision to censor words, not URLs. It is important that you take up the call and spread it as widely as possible. I am asking for your help. With this post, my blog will be banned from some Texas school districts. When I'm done editing my own web pages, none of the resources I have spent years collecting will be available to the thousands of educators who have used them in the past.I urge you to advocate this in every blog posting and web page you create. Add the word "MySp@ce" and/or "MySp@ce.com" to it. Get yourselves "censored" for it is better to be censored than to support authoritarian approaches to education in schools today.
You are powerful beyond measure. Subversion is no longer sufficient, if it ever was...we must tell the truth. We are Americans, and we must stand up against this, not angrily but in such a way that those who seek to censor come to understand the error of their ways.
I'm very happy to see Miguel, Wes and others standing up against inane filtering practices. I also support a campaign by educational bloggers to raise awareness for educators unfamiliar with this controversy. The question I have, though, is how do you spread a campaign when the very act of describing the campaign gets you censored? For example, any of the affected teachers trying to access Miguel's blog would be blocked. Undoubtedly, there are many other schools in the US using similar filtering parameters; educators there would also be unable to learn about the campaign, let alone participate. So that's why I've decided to spell the word in question with an "@" in it so there's a greater chance educators working behind the virtual iron curtain of filtering software will at least be aware of what's going on. That is, assuming they can access my site at all, since I've used the M-word on previous posts.
The whole thing reminds me of Those We Don't Speak Of, the mysterious creatures in M. Night Shyamalan's film, The Village. The parents of the village were so paranoid about their children coming to harm's way that they wouldn't even say the name of the creatures that were supposedly lurking in the local forest. We seem to have reached that point in education - where politicians and administrators are so paranoid that educators can't even speak the names of things that may lurk in the virtual forest, lest their students be corrupted by mere mention of them.
Miguel concludes:
It is not enough for us to sugarcoat or protect children, we must confront inappropriateness wherever we find it, serving as an example of what it means to be "appropriate" in the world.... This is our civic space, my space, your space, our space. We must, as Margot Stern Strom, president and executive director of Facing History and Ourselves, find ways to "engage adolescents in meaningful ways of how we learn to live together."
The Internet is indeed our civic space - my space, your space. Our space. How can educators educate our children to use the Internet as responsible 21st century citizens when we can't even speak about the things that might affect them? -andy
Posted by acarvin at April 18, 2006 12:56 PM
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