The Internet Classroom: Sex is only the tip of the iceberg

I am very proud to work as "Learning Technology" Manager at Cheltenham Secondary College, a large well respected state secondary school in Melbourne. I have immense respect for the work of Paul Doherty, General Manager DEET IT whose focus on providing resources directly to schools (instead of building a bureaucracy) has transformed the size and effectiveness of IT resources for students.
There is always something left undone. There is always an area which one would wish to see develop in a different direction. In Victoria, one such area is the educational use of the internet. I believe that open access to the internet at school is only marginally better than open access to commercial TV in terms of educational benefit. The huge quantity, variety and high quality of non-educational content available provides a constant distraction for students who wish to learn.
Imagine putting a TV and VCR beside a student at school (or at home) and hoping that they will resist the temptation to watch the Seinfeld marathon instead of their MacBeth Video.
The internet is the equivalent of teachers taking students to a newsagency instead of a library. Blocking sites is the equivalent of the sealed plastic cover. A newsagency will never be a library.
Students know that the main social purpose of the TV, the computer and the internet is to entertain as an inducement to sell. The student who is committed and self-disciplined will resist this temptation and use the power of the technology to achieve great things.
The more susceptible (and isn't that a definition of most children) will use the internet as it was designed rather than make the effort to seek educational excellence. The effect of the technology is to increase the difference in the learning outcomes between these students - not to make them more equal. It places another pitfall in front of a student whose family has not been able to insulate him or her from the message of instant gratification and selfishness that pervades all media.
Attempts at internet censorship within schools will always be a failure. All blocking or disabling lists can achieve is the removal of the worst excesses of pornography and usually only after children have been exposed. What they can never change is the massive emphasis on the sensational and the trivial over the educational and valuable.
What we need is an approach modelled on successful educational information systems in existence.
A library doesn't just buy the first 1000 books and hope that they will cover most students needs and not distract them. A journal (even if published on the web) doesn't just publish every article submitted. We need a system that allows access to websites based on their appropriateness for various subjects. Technically, this approach is simple and built into the software of every school and education department web server. Instead of "allow all except this list" the software provides the option to "block all except for this list". Each school web server could download regularly and automatically download a copy of their preferred list. A technical alternative to each school having a list would be for the government to maintain a number of "proxy servers" which schools can use. These proxy servers would maintain the lists centrally and probably allow faster processing.
The challenge is for the government to assist by cooperating with commercial "portals" to develop site lists that will enhance different age levels, and even subjects. To say that it is technically impossible to protect children from the excesses of the internet is just plain
wrong.
This takes work, just as librarians in every library in the world work to select books and other resources from the myriad offered to them. There will be argument. Librarians and their controlling bodies are focuses of debate for what is social improvement and what constitutes acceptable diversity. When there is only so much shelf space, what resources will improve our society most ? When do we cater for what many readers want (hard core pornography) and what they need ("quality" literature and information) ?
Imagine the interest from universities or search engines such as Google in a contract to develop and maintain a range of site lists for Victorian Education. They would gain immensely from the intellectual kudos, as well as the potential for on-selling to other educational markets desperate for a way of allowing educational access - compared to non-educational exposure. Imagine the pressure on general internet sites to provide free quality information that would get them on such a list. Many sites may develop different "editions" of sites for different target audiences. This is not an unacceptable burden. Many journals currently do this, not only for different age users, but for different regional interests, different languages and even varieties of home hardware and software that users may have at home.
Many sites may begin to exercise some responsibility for content within their sites. Geocities.com exercises very little restraint and contains many areas of pornographic content. Most responsible schools will have already blocked it. Unfortunately, it also contains some useful material. It just requires some editorial judgement from geocities to separate put their "domain" in order so that the rooms with obscenities are insulated from the rooms where students may benefit from information.
Is this public censorship ? Absolutely NOT. Such a system would not place any restriction on the internet access of the general public. Students could use public internet access at home to get information from more obscure or questionable sources.
Why isn't anyone doing this ? Virtually all services and related software products such as CyberPatrol, NetNanny, "AOL Parental Control", "Google SafeSearch" work on censorship rather than selection. Telstra tried and then dumped Kidznet which was a very limited attempt at offering only a selection of sites through a very artificial interface design.
What would work is a software service that works just like the internet except that only a selected list of sites can be visited. Students would visit a "portal" such as the Victorian Education Channel and search. The list of sites retrieved would be from a category that the school has chosen as suitable for its educational aims e.g. Junior Secondary. The student would see an extensive list of sites ranked intelligently in order of relevance. The only difference would be the absence of many sites inappropriate to the junior secondary school curriculum.
If the student used an alternative unrestricted search page elsewhere on the internet, they would see a greater number of sites but when they attempted to visit them at school they would receive an error message. They could note these sites and visit them from home or from another open access computer., but they would soon learn that school was not the place for these distractions.
The current Victorian Education Channel is hardly ever used by teachers or students because of the low number and quality of many of the sites listed, the severely restricted list of world wide internet sites, the ineffectiveness of its relevance ranking. To make the selections useful, the government would need to purchase expertise from existing site listing companies such as Google or Yahoo. Commercial organisations would be delighted to get involved in what could be a world leading method of harnessing the wild beast of the world wide web to actually serve students learning.
It is easy to imagine many spin offs from such an approach. Many parents would be interested in paying for such a service at home as well as at school. Many businesses who are currently scaling down their "free" access material may be willing to open them up they were offered a listing. Otherwise, such a selection list would not bother to include "subscription only" sites.
The purpose of school is to educate. The purpose of internet sites is far more diverse. To expose students to this diversity distracts more often than it educates. Now that we are so well resourced, I hope that the Victorian Government is not content to merely point the way by providing access, but leads they way by creating an educational internet equivalent of the "place to be".