Tyranny of Filtering

I managed to squeeze in an extra podcast this week.  Teachers Teaching Teachers #95 dives into filtering first hand with the people that run the filters in an assortment of districts.  The panelists ranged from a New York City department of education system engineer to a tech administrator from Alaska.

The federal government requires filtering in any district that receives E-Rate funding.  Even though the federal government’s contribution to the bottom line of the local district is somewhat small compared to state and local funds, most schools comply with federal filtering requirements.

Specifically, districts must have several policies in place.

These include: measures to block or filter pictures that (a) are obscene, (b) contain child pornography, or (c) when computers with Internet access are used by minors, harmful to minors. (CIPA)

At every conference I attend where vendors of filtering software are on the show floor, I always ask the same question.  “Do you guarantee your filtering solution will block 100% of those items required by CIPA.”  So far not a single filtering vendor has been willing to guarantee anything like that.  The Internet grows too fast to make this claim.

Filtering by definition cannot be perfect, but the government still requires it.

This podcast quickly gets beyond the CIPA mandates and into how filtering at the district level really works.  I was glad to hear about one aspect of filtering that most teachers and students don’t think about: bandwidth.  Many schools block streaming media because the district doesn’t have the bandwidth to handle it.  In these cases, blocking streaming media has little to do with the content of that media.

The most important point in this podcast was that teachers need to find out how the filtering rules are modified in a district.  All of the panelists said that most requests to unblock sites are granted, but a teacher has to know how to make her voice heard.