foolfillment: the blog

There’s a flurry of posts over at Ewan McIntosh’s blog today, standing out in particular to me is discussion about filters in schools, when I was in school the filter was a constant pain - the internet was off limits for chemistry research because too many sites used the words bonds and bonding, a sixth year colleague who was trying to work for her AH Modern Studies dissertation couldn’t do any reseach at school becuase her topic was to do with prostitution. No doubt filters have become more sophisticated but I can’t help but feel that we have the duty to prepare students for what they could come across when they use the net at home, would it not be of more benefit to try to build good practice where we can monitor what is being viewed than to restrict everything potentially dangerous until the kids are alone?
These thoughts echo the sentiment behind Struan’s post on to bebo or not to bebo a few weeks back. We have the duty to educate kids on how to get the best out of the web and to avoid the nasty bits, but instead we wrap them up in cotton wool and pretend everything’s hunkydory untill they leave the building, the other side of it is that at the same time we are restricting their access to potentially valuable tools - I know some of my fellow BTechEd students have found difficulties getting access to moodle while we’ve been out on placement, and how many blogs, wikis, email clients, IRC clients can you use in schools?

As an aside, diamond geezer’s post on Wednesday spurred me to update my blogroll, so I’ve added - at last - a few of the edublogs that I’ve been reading, and checked the other links, there’s still a few other there that seem dormant but I don’t want to write them off just yet. Dive in they’re over there —>

This entry was posted at 3:01 pm on the 2nd of June, 2006 and is filed under internet stuff, teach. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.