At our more productive than usual technology committee meeting Tuesday afternoon we once again addressed the issue of filtering. Most video hosting sites, such as YouTube and ifilm, are blocked and those of us in Social Studies lament the fact that we are denied the endless supply of relevant news clips that could be used on any given day. Last year we gave up replacing textbooks to use our budget to equip every classroom with a projector. We have everything we need to use the material on the internet, except the permission to use it. The content is there on one side of the ethernet and our projector is on the other. In-between stands the tyranny of the Children’s Internet Protection Act.
Children of the 21st century will live their lives in a tornado of media and information. Any list of essential learnings worth its weight has to include the type of information literacy skills that can sniff out bogus web sites. Shouldn’t that list also include skills that can decode the language, images and influence of the video news media? Denying social studies teachers the ability to use this media denies them the ability to develop the citizenships skills essential to the success of our democracy. If you don’t believe me, ask an English teacher if they can teach literature without novels.
Sure there are work-arounds. Download it at home, convert it to a .flv file and get a .flv player on your machine at school.
Right.
I myself may do that if I find a really good clip like John Edwards fixing his hair for a couple minutes or Hillary obviously pandering to a southern audience by breaking out her down-home y’all’s drawl. But I would not do it often. As for most teachers, once you use an acronym like flv you’re lost. They are not to be faulted for this, they shouldn’t have to manipulate the material. Expecting a teacher to convert files at home and bring them to school would be the equivalent of asking the English teachers to bind their own books. Flexibility, creativity and relevance are lost when work-arounds are the only option.
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For example, last year I can across Aaron Broussard’s crying on Meet the Press shortly after Hurricane Katrina in September of 2005. As an official of Jefferson Parish, he related the story of a friend’s elderly mother who died in a nursing home. He complained about numerous FEMA mistakes. As this was in the days before the seventh grade pop-up parade in Connecticut, we still had easy access to videos like this |
Not accustomed to seeing a grown man cry, especially on national television, his performance left a class of shocked juniors speechless and emotionally drained. After a few minutes of philosophy about the power of mother nature and uncertainly of life, their comments soon turned to anger. I let them beat up on president Bush, the ineffective federal government and FEMA for a couple of minutes.
Then it was time for a lesson in media deciphering. Bloggers had gotten a hold of this story and followed up on all of the particulars in Broussard’s story and it turns out that the truth was stretched beyond the breaking point. “Yes,” I told the sold-out juniors, “you’ve been had”. Broussard was lying and they bought it all.
How can I teach that lesson if the video was hosted at a site blocked by a filter?
I’m told that in order claim that we are “CIPA compliant”, we have to certify that we are doing “everything necessary” to protect minors from inappropriate content. This means that everyone in the school community, from students to superintendent, is subject to the same access restrictions to the internet. Although the wording of this law is open to interpretation and leaves open loopholes big enough for a lawyer to drive a truck through, there must be a way that teachers can be trusted to exercise appropriate judgment.
I absolutely recognize and respect the concerns of the district, standing at what must seem like the wrong end of a litigation shooting gallery. As a parent, I filter content from my sons and daughter.
Yet, can we give teachers a “key” and trust them with it? Even if they are going beyond the due diligence required by the federal government, what do we do with the previews of other videos that constantly change and ride right alongside the player window? Should YouTube or some other site make a safe home for content? How can they check if the content is safe? And if there are people in the world who would catch some jollies by posting a few frames of obscenity in the middle of the state of the union address, how can we ever be sure what we are showing is safe?
Are the any answers out there?
Infinitude 