Roger Cohen’s got a column in today’s New York Times calling for wider US availability of the Al Jazeera English news channel. It’s an interesting read. For me, though, the value of the column comes early on (emphasis mine):

America, and not just its front-line soldiers, needs to watch Al Jazeera to understand how the world has changed. Any other course amounts to self-destructive blindness.

The first change that must be grasped is America’s diminished ability to influence people. Global access to information now amounts to an immense à la carte menu. Networks escape control. To hundreds of millions of people accessing information for the first time, from central China to Kenya’s Rift Valley, the United States can easily look exclusive and less relevant to their future.

I don’t want to get all “Did You Know?” here–I’ve already presented the video, under official duress, to my colleagues. I do, however, want to challenge our district to actually live up to its admiration for the Partnership for 21st Century Skills and admit that things have changed, that the shifts have happened, and that we need to adapt or fail. There is no room for half-measures here.

In the middle of last week, I attempted to access Flickr from one of our office computers. I use photographs for a lot of activities, from asking my sophomores to brainstorm about segregation to inspiration for my writing students. I tend to get my photos from Flickr because it’s easy to use and I store my own photos there. Until the school district gives us enough online storage space for our own photos, I will continue to use Flickr.

Anyway, so when I tried to get to Flickr last week, I was presented with our district’s new filtering regime. We’ve had filtering in place for longer than I’ve worked in the district, but toward the end of last school year, the software they use was upgraded to something far more robust. Flickr was blocked because of, among other reasons, “photo storage” (which is exactly the point of Flickr, no?) and “nudity” (really? On Flickr?). Therefore: blanket ban on the site. I filled in the override form and am still waiting for a response, but I doubt I’ll get one.

Okay, okay. So one teacher can’t get to his photos from school. He should just print them out at home the night before, right? Yes. Absolutely. But what about all the other online tools that we can’t use from work? I can’t, for example, show my students any YouTube videos. Nobody reading this post from my school can watch any of the following, all of which I’ve wanted to use in my classroom in the past year or so:

And then there are the dozens of clips students have emailed me, clips that they have found because they were interested in what we were doing in class and decided to go a little deeper at home.

We have a new Acceptable Use Policy as of this year, and it’s one that finally makes sense (emphasis mine):

Despite every effort for supervision and filtering, all users and their parents/guardians are advised that access to the electronic network may include the potential for access to materials inappropriate for school-aged students. Every user must take responsibility for his or her use of the network and Internet and avoid these sites.

The bit about “filtering,” by the way, most likely refers to the fact that in any given classroom at any given time, you’ll find three or four or five students who know how to use proxy servers to get around our filters. If you’re one of my colleagues, or you work at a school with a similar fear of the internets, you should find out which of your students know how to defeat the filter. It’s useful information.

At any rate, the above excerpt pretty much sums it all up–responsible internet use (and our school’s motto is, if you can believe it, “Freedom with Responsibility”) means taking, umm, responsibility for your actions. To me, the rules should be simple: If you look at porn in the Media Center, you lose your network privileges. If you log in to Facebook when you’re supposed to be printing your Civics essay, you lose your privileges. Et cetera. That’s logical. What we’re doing, though, has as much do with teaching as it does with fishmongery.

I started this post with a bit about not being able to see Al Jazeera in the US. And I stand by that introduction. By blocking our students from being able to use the internets for useful things–for finding clips on YouTube that are directly related to the instructional program, for accessing scholarship (the filter blocked a literary biography of Eudora Welty a while back), for communicating (I’d love to have my students join up with Clay Burell’s students on their Ning, but, well…)–we deny our students a shot at relating reality to their education. Will some knuckleheads abuse the privilege? Most likely. And then we, as responsible and caring adults, will have to discharge our duty and work with them to correct their behavior. We can explain to their parents the nature of the offense, as all network actions are logged, and we can then justify the punishment. Case closed.

So who works at a school with no or little filtration? How does it work? What are some counterarguments? I’m trying to make a case for this in the not-so-distant future, so any input/feedback would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.