It's called Intellectual Freedom
Wednesday, October 3, 2007 at 08:04PM 
An open letter to technology directors who block YouTube, blogs, e-mail sites, and any other web resource not expressly required to be blocked by CIPA (which is pictoral pornography - period).
Dear Sirs:
There is long held belief in libraryland that one one selects a resource on the basis of it having some things of value rather than censor a resource based on it having some parts without value or which might possibly cause offense. In choosing to block YouTube, you are a censor. You violate your staff's and students' intellectual freedom, their rights to view. By arbitratily blocking other sites, you are violating your staff's and students' right to read. You are denying them their rights accorded by the First Amendment.
Let's take your policy to its logical conclusion. Were I, as a tech director, teacher, taxpayer or parent in your district, to ask you to block Wikipedia, Encyclopedia or World Book since each suggests evolution may be a reputable scientific theory, shouldn't you block those sources, despite them also having content of value to students? Should I disagree with the view of the NAACP website, ought you not block that as well? As a good Democrat, I really think most neocon values are pornographic and children shouldn't be exposed to them. Let's only allow students access to sites that espouse the "just say no" theory of birth control and STD prevention.
Or perhaps your district does block at this level.
Blocking Internet sights simply shows professional disrespect - your values are good, other educators are not.
Smart people like you should know better. It's better to allow and have a resource challenged, than to block it "just in case."
Do yourself and your students a favor and read up a little on Intellectual Freedom. A good place to start is at ALA's Intellectual Freedom Q&A site. Quite honestly, I don't see how anyone should be able to graduate from college without understanding the First Amendment. But's never too late to get that education one ought to have received back when. (Did you ever think that school is wasted on the young?)
All the best,
Doug
From the Amercian Library Association Office of Intellectual Freedom website:
What Is Intellectual Freedom?
Intellectual freedom is the right of every individual to both seek and receive information from all points of view without restriction. It provides for free access to all expressions of ideas through which any and all sides of a question, cause or movement may be explored.
Why Is Intellectual Freedom Important?
Intellectual freedom is the basis for our democratic system. We expect our people to be self-governors. But to do so responsibly, our citizenry must be well-informed. Libraries provide the ideas and information, in a variety of formats, to allow people to inform themselves.
Intellectual freedom encompasses the freedom to hold, receive and disseminate ideas.
Who Attempts Censorship?
In most instances, a censor is a sincerely concerned individual who believes that censorship can improve society, protect children, and restore what the censor sees as lost moral values. But under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, each of us has the right to read, view, listen to, and disseminate constitutionally protected ideas, even if a censor finds those ideas offensive.
Rants 
Reader Comments (8)
I'm not sure that "technology directors" have control of the filters anymore in many schools. At least not "educational technology directors." It seems to be increasingly taken over by IT, which has no foundation whatsoever in intellectual freedom or any code of professional ethics regarding access to information. It is simply not in their job description.
But the underlying problem is that librarians failed to demand/get/take control of this function from the beginning.
Doug,
You said "An open letter to technology directors who block YouTube, blogs, e-mail sites, and any other web resource not expressly required to be blocked by CIPA (which is pictoral pornography - period)."
That is not completely true. According to the FCC website:
"Schools and libraries subject to CIPA are required to adopt and implement a policy addressing: (a) access by minors to inappropriate matter on the Internet; (b) the safety and security of minors when using electronic mail, chat rooms, and other forms of direct electronic communications; (c) unauthorized access, including so-called “hacking,” and other unlawful activities by minors online; (d) unauthorized disclosure, use, and dissemination of personal information regarding minors; and (e) restricting minors’ access to materials harmful to them."(http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/cipa.html)
Basically, most schools meet this requirement by adopting the policy "we block these sites". It does not say those sites HAVE to be blocked (so in essence Doug, you are right except that the law doesn't say pornography...it says "obscene, child pornography, or harmful to minors"). I think that most schools apply this law far too liberally when it comes to blocking websites - AND BY LAW there has to be some way to disable the filter for adults performing research - which I bet a majority of schools cannot do.I control the filter for my school district and I am doing my best to make it what it is supposed to be - a reassurance to parents and lawmakers that little Johnny and/or Susie cannot accidentally access obscene, lewd, other otherwise inappropriate content on the Internet. Teachers still have to act like professionals and use the resources responsible - but you and I both know there are people teaching that haven't quite got a grasp on responsible behavior yet. So how do you cover it? You train them! Tell them what is expected of them when they have students use the Internet...perhaps their irresponsibility is just a lack of understanding?
And get the "keys" to the filter away from the IT guys! (I say this even though I run the IT department...I taught for seven years first - I've experienced the pain of a filtered Internet under the direction of a overzealous technology director).
I concur with Tom and Brian and offer these few words in response:
http://www.mguhlin.net/archives/2007/10/entry_3712.htm
Thanks,
Miguel Guhlin
Around the Corner-MGuhlin.net
http://mguhlin.net
P.S. the few, the proud, the eaten...Librarians. What? Oh. Read this:
http://www.mguhlin.net/archives/2007/10/entry_3701.htm
I agree with pretty much everything you say, Doug, but context matters.
A decision to block (or not) can just as easily be based on practical considerations like the fact that students are using up bandwidth watching music videos because they're sitting in the computer lab listening to their teacher tell them how to make pie charts in Excel.
In other words they're bored and they know how to use the tools to get at things that interest them, be it YouTube, MySpace, or ESPN.com (and they know how to conceal it from their teachers!). And that use, while not involving inappropriate *content* (accd. to the FCC), is infringing on other students' access to legitimate learning resources like Wikipedia because bandwidth is finite.
I would be ecstatic if I thought teachers and students were using YouTube in positive ways--creating original content and taking advantage of the good stuff out there. Unfortunately, I know that is not the case.
Early in my career, I supported technology a technology-rich learning environment where the teachers truly valued the interests of students and allowed them to pursue meaningful and relevant tasks. It was remarkable how the students took ownership of the computers and to a large extent policed themselves. I am convinced that this was due to the fact that they viewed the computers as important tools that helped them meet their *own* learning goals. When I need to use a computer to accomplish a task that is important to *me*, I'm not going to be very tolerant of a classmate tying up the machine checking his MySpace page or worse, doing something that might put *my* access to the tools at risk.
Just know that there are those of us out here who really want to do the right thing for the right reasons, but are faced with a day-to-day reality that makes it difficult, if not impossible.
Even if we could train our students to research correctly and appropriately so they would choose correct and appropriate sites, there will still be other people who purposely make their incorrect and inappropriate sites appear (why did my daughter and I get pictures of women in bikinis when we used "roman entertainment" in a search engine?!). I do want my students (and maybe more importantly my children) to have open access, but I do not want them to have to wade through the crap that will show up on their screens - even for a fraction of a second.
I am currently in a unit where my students are reading one of the seven books of The Chronicles of Narnia. Since the Lion, Witch and Wardrobe is a movie (and Prince Caspian comes out as a movie soon) many of the Narnia web sites are blocked by our local filter. HOWEVER - I was able to find a number of good, educational and academic sites with a little more effort.
There is good information out there that can be found through filters - the response "All the web sites are blocked" is not a valid excuse for my students.
What's most disconcerting is that the majority of people who need to read your post have this site blocked at their schools. Oh, the horror! The inappropriateness. That blue skunk (which, interestingly, served as the name for passing gas when I was in high school...somebody should have blocked those things!!!).
True story from the trenches (a place people making the decisions about blocking sites no longer occupy):
Students in my English class, young, pristine souls of goodness, uncorrupted to the core, crafted polling questions and put them on ZohoPolls. These students worked exceptionally hard at crafting prompts that were clear, insightful, content-rich, and meaningful to a global audience. One student's poll received over 40 votes, many with comments from people from all over the world.
Wow! But ZohoPolls has a tag cloud and some of the words that appear include (in no particular order and surely not in order of preference): 'anal', 'penis', and 'beer'. One student wondered if I knew about the tags. Yes, I did. I asked if it should be blocked. And here's his answer:
"If it's blocked, how will we learn to use this stuff correctly?"
Maybe he should be an IT guy.
Doug,
I agree with what you are arguing over. I am in charge of this process in my school district, and our technology committee has had some really difficult debates on the issue. It is becoming more challenging and specific technologies, mainly those applications which most people consider Web 2.0 are becoming more prevalent. When websites used to be authored by one entity, this (filtering) was much easier to deal with. So, we definitely have a much harder road ahead of us.
What I disagree with is the premise of your statements; that simply choosing to filter out sites violates someone's First Amendment rights. My guess is that your district has chosen to filter some sites and done so because of CIPA. My guess is that you also have some latitude in making interpretations so that your vendor is not in complete control of what is and what is not filtered. If you do engage in that practice, have you not done the same thing that you have criticized others for doing?
In fact, if you ban an entire website and subpages - let's make up a fake (I hope) name like thisishorribleprn.com - and indeed that site has a page of information about the dangers of addiction, have you not taken away a resource which students have a right to read and a right to view.
Please understand, I am playing devil's advocate. The intellectual freedom statements applied wonderfully to libraries, but librarians practice selection. They choose to NOT allow certain things into their libraries simply due to prioritization of dollars or because they have reveiwed and found the material not to be appropriate.
We have no similar practice with the Internet - at least I know our district has no capacity to pre-select content.
Now, I understand your original article is about filtering out things out of fear and I've heard many horror stories of overblocking. Ironically, you never hear from districts who are handling this well, because... that doesn't make good blog-fodder.
My point is that I don't think the ideas of intellectual freedom apply so easily to Internet content, and I also think it nearly impossible to claim First Amendment infringement. First Amendment rights have never been absolute and without limits, and while the court case that upheld the constitutionality of CIPA was heavily focused on public libraries, I do not think the same arguments would have held up as well as they did if CIPA was looked at strictly through the lens of K12 schools and our mostly minor populations.
I like to think we underblock in our district, but I have to admit, it is getting to be more and more difficult.
Hi Joel,
I really appreciate this thoughtful response. It is a VERY difficult issue. Yes, our district blocks some sites as required by CIPA (we did not before it became law) and, yes, we do have control through white and black lists of customizing our commercial filter. So, yes, we technically abrogate our users First Amendment rights.
What I think the issues are are the degree to which the filtering in done and if there is a process in place for selecting sites which are filtered or allowed. When blocking is done without input from users, especially educators, it can easily turn into censorship.
And you are right - with the Internet it gets problematic pre-selecting content. Some district actually HAFE done this, allowing access to only white-listed sites. To me, this diminishes the richness and the reality of the Internet.
My analogy here is that we have "selected" the Internet as a resource of value to students, in the same way select a magazine, newspaper or periodical database. Since the content of those resources is fluid, they may contain information that is not useful or even inappropriate. But the overall value of the resource outweighs the negatives.
Our district gets few complaints, thankfully, about over or under blocking, as you suggest.
For a less "rant-ish" view of this, see:
http://www.doug-johnson.com/dougwri/maintaining-intellectual-freedom-in-a-filtered-world.html
Again, I really appreciate your posting. This is NOT a black and white issue to say the least.
All the very best,
Doug