BFTP: CPVP
Friday, January 14, 2011 at 06:24PM 
A weekend Blue Skunk "feature" will be a revision of an old post. I'm calling this BFTP: Blast from the Past. Original post January 24, 2006. Here's a follow-up column: Filtering Follies.
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 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, dinosaurs, 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 (2)
Absolultely a process is needed otherwise you can spend all your time working on the Internet filter...
I also wish we could get as many parents actively engaged with their child's education and even showing up for parent/teacher conferences as there are worrying about what students will access on the Internet or in the school library...
Hi Mary,
Maybe we need to do "bait and switch." Tell parents the meeting is about Internet porn and then switch to a real educational topic. So crazy it just might work!
Doug