Did a hands-on workshop focusing on social software: delicious, blogs, flickr, and wiki. While the group was interested and enjoyed trying out the various tools, their main question was how can we use these tools while protecting our kids? It’s a completely legitimate question. And I find myself sorting around for compromising answers that will still allow them to use the tools. Unfortunately, all the compromises tend to strip out the power of these tools. So, we let kids blog but no one else can read them. Or we download photos from flickr rather than letting out students browse the pictures themselves.
I don’t have an answer that makes me happy. I know of at least one school division that has started the practice of white listing: the entire Internet is filtered and then teachers who wish to use certain sites submit them to the administrator so they can be opened. I understand, I understand…schools are in the business of protecting kids. But when they go home, the Internet is probably not filtered and we have done nothing to help them figure out how to work in this online world. So, now they are, IMHO, doubly at risk because they are unarmed.
I would like to see us focus more on educating kids to protect themselves. What do you do if you find something bad on flickr? They have a built-in reporting feature so the community can police itself to a certain extent. I’m not suggesting we let kindergartners loose on the web but by the time our students have reached late middle and high school, we need to be talking to them about the power and potential for harm on the web.
