CPVPV
Tuesday, January 24, 2006 at 10:13AM 
The Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (CPVPV) is the official name of the religious police in Saudi Arabia. I rather like the name itself (where can I get a t-shirt?), but I wouldn't want to be in charge of such an organization in my school. Unfortunately, the propagation of virtue and prevention of vice are roles that some tech departments have assigned themselves. Heaven knows why.
Wes Fryer, the IT Guy at TechLEARNING.com gets it partially right in his article Blocking MySpace.com and on his personal blog writing mySpace and iSafety. Bless his heart, Wes does advocate for a least-restrictive environment as the best place to teach kids how to use the Internet. As Carol Simpson likes to say, teaching kids Internet safety in an over-filtered environment is like teaching kids to cross the street by never letting them out of the basement.
But what Wes alludes to, but does not address is who, in the end, makes the decision to block or not bock mySpace or any site on the Internet? He only says:
Whether or not the final decision of the district is to block in-school student access to MySpace.com, these issues must be raised and publicly addressed.
How?
Some readers may know this is a real pet project of mine - getting every district, with the help of our professional associations, to have formal processes in place to determine what web resources are blocked and which are not. And such a process IS workable. We folks on the tech side, need to quickly determine a means of establishing a process for making choices about whether resources should or should not be blocked - or we are in for a world of hurt. And here's why..
- Today a teacher asks that a game site is blocked. The IT department complies.
- Tomorrow a parent asks that a site on gay marriage, evolution, or a right-wing Christian fundamentalist be blocked.
- The day after that, another parent or teacher asks that those sites be unblocked.
Who is left in the middle? If we have established a past practice of blocking (or unblocking) any request, we will always have to block (or unblock) every request AND we will probably be spending an inordinate amount of time doing so.
The decision of whether to block or not block should be done formally, openly, and in the same way any other material challenge is handled in a school district. Period.
IT folks, you really don't want to be considered your school's Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. Don't we have more important jobs to do?
Reader Comments (6)
Do you see any problem if we modelled a system like Flickr does to manage pictorial contant on their site?
Basically, all users have the ability to notify Flickr by clicking a flag, if they come across something that should be blocked. If Flickr receives said number of flags, they take temp action. If a disagreement follows, they open a floor for discussion, and more votes taken. After a period of debate and lobbying from the users, Flickr takes action on the vote.
The Flickr method sounds very democratic and certainly better than purely autocratic decision-making. Who exactly would get to vote? Teachers, administrators, parents, students?
We have a permanently established "reconsideration" committee of teachers and administrators that handles all materials challenges in the district. (These challenges must be in writing and follow a form.) The committee members all read or view the materials and then make a recommendation to the school board about the material. This seems to work quite well.
But still, I'd be willing to put materials to a vote - provided students could participate as well. Really interesting concept.
Doug
Best,
Amy
Quite thought provoking, and after a few days of that, here's the thought: (I've been wanting to ask the following question for years, and have always held back out of fear of ridicule, but here it goes.) What is wrong with a white list? Isn't that what the library collection is? A set of materials selected by professionals to serve student learning? I'm not talking just content here, but quality too. I'm not familiar with how an Internet white-list could happen (and yes it seems most likely to be an impossible task), but it occurs to me that relying on expertise to let things in rather than an algorithm that keeps things out could be more useful. Couldn't it be the school's chance to model for students exactly the skills we want them to build? I can just see the librarian coming into a classroom to show the students "These are the web-based resources that were selected for the Z project and this is how we selected them." The question would then become "Who has a say on what gets in?" My view on that is trust the pros and have both a request and a challenge process available (kudos on yours). Please set me straight. (BTW: No I'm not a library/media professional and yes I'm aware of federal filtering mandates.)
A white list (of allowed sites) has been discussed and even used by some districts, I believe. I know a district that ONLY allowed sites chosen by Nettrekker, for example.
The problem, as I see it, with white lists is that they are impractical, not unethical. Think of the poor white list keeper confronted with potentially thousands of requests for additions to white lists. (A single teacher reading an allowed professional article might encounter a dozen hyperlinks she might want access to.) Who could possibly keep up a master white list that contains even a fraction of the information kids and staff should have access to?
The analogy I use for selection and the Web is that is more like an encyclopedia than a library. When I buy World Book, I am providing access a single source of information, although the articles were written by dozens of people. Once I purchase the set, I don't think it is ethical for me to chop out the pages with which I don't agree.
I am not sure that analogy works completely either, but what the heck.
Thanks for the thoughtful comments,
Doug
I always appreciate being brought up to speed on the realities in schools. I'm a bit disappointed that teachers are not trusted sufficiently that the teacher's use in your example would cause any sort of problem.