In my last post, I gushed about instagrok. And ARRRRGGGGGHHHH! It's blocked by Lightspeed! Lightspeed is the BCPS filter. The reason it was blocked was listed as blogs. So I emailed the Webfilter team and noted that this was a search engine not a blog. I soon received a reply which said they had asked for a re-evaluation by Lightspeed and it came back as nudity.
I was incredulous! Wait a minute! This is advertised as an educational tool. How can there be nudity? They must have made a mistake! So I questioned again and this time they came back and said search for nudity. Sure enough there it was!
Holy Hannah! Are they that out of touch? Why would you promote something as educational and then allow controversial stuff to creep into your algorithims! I'm certainly not an advocate of censorship, but I work in a high school and watching teenage boys standing around a computer monitor snickering is the dead give-away. If its way too easy to get to inappropriate stuff as it was on this one, it should not be designed for educational use. Our kids are smarter than us in the area of technology and they can find it when it's buried deep.
I know this is still an evolving medium, but what a waste of a great product!
Hi Barbara,
ReplyDeleteI went to Instagrok from home and typed several words that might have hunted down sexually explicit material...and no nudity came through. Wonder what BCPS's Lightspeed defines as nudity? There was a link to a wikipedia article on pornography, but the article had no nudity present. Seems like a great way search tool. Too bad it can't be used.
Kevin Lavey
I can't imagine navigating the internet with high school students, they know so much more than we do!
ReplyDeleteThe question of blocking sites is a real ethical question. My thinking is that students have access to all kinds of sites that contain nudity, drugs, etc. Our job is to help students use web content appropriately, not block their access to it. If a student stabs another student with a pencil, do we ban pencils? There are so many rich web 2.0 tools out there, but our "control" of the medium inhibits teir access and expression. Truth is, the kids who wnat access to inappropriate content will find it despite our best efforts. I think companies that promote their site as "educational" have a responsibilty to keep appropriate. Just like we have the responsibility to make sure students are learning appropriate on-line and posting behavior.
ReplyDelete~John Billingslea