Intellectual Freedom: Where Do You Stand?

This week is banned books week. From the ALA website:

BBW celebrates the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them. After all, intellectual freedom can exist only where these two essential conditions are met.

Courtesy of Doug Johnson, we also might want to celebrate Blocked Bytes Week:

As Doug says:

Americans need the freedom to read more than just books.

As Doug has suggested before, I think many schools interpret CIPA incorrectly (read: too stringently). (Also see these three earlier posts on The Fischbowl.) He then shares some very interesting information in the comments:

Yes, we do block some sites - those specifically required by CIPA - basically pornography. We trust our filter settings to make accurate judgments about this.

What keep us from being "censors," I believe, is that for any non-pornographic site to be blocked requires a formal process be followed similar to a reconsideration process for banning a book.

Ahhh, now that’s an interesting idea. The default in Doug’s district is that a non-pornographic site is accessible, and they have to go through a process to block it. In other words, somebody in the district has to show cause and make a case for blocking a particular site, as opposed to allowing a filtering company to make that judgment (typically based on categories) from afar. That lines up pretty well with what I’ve said before about my own school:

Our philosophy is to have high expectations for our students, to educate them to behave ethically, responsibly and safely and then expect that they will do the right thing. When they don’t, they know we’ll have a conversation and try to learn from the mistake, but we don’t assume they are going to screw up. In other words, our philosophy has been to educate, not ban.

This filtering approach is the opposite of most districts and brings up an interesting philosophical discussion: should access to information generally be considered a good thing and therefore the default status is allowing access? Or should access to information be considered a bad thing and therefore the default status should be to block it? How much power should schools have to "censor" information and prevent students from accessing it? And who makes that decision? What are our schools' core values regarding intellectual freedom?

And, no matter where you fall on those questions, how do we best prepare our students for the unfiltered world they live in when they step off the bus? (Or open their cell phones? Or pull out their laptops with their own unfiltered connection to the Internet?)

(For the record, my district has a relatively open filter compared to most school districts, and we have a clear process where we can request that sites be unblocked. We also have a teacher override that gets teachers to many - but not all - blocked sites. Of the sites listed on Doug’s graphic, only three of them are currently blocked for students: Twitter, Ning and Second Life. Other sites that are blocked include YouTube, Google Video, MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, and all sites deemed pornographic by 8e6, our Internet filter company.)

Update 9-30-08: Heard this related story on NPR this morning. Talks about the intial banning of The Grapes of Wrath, so more about books and less about the Internet, but interesting nonetheless.

Even More On Filtering

Okay, I’m about done with this topic, I promise. But I keep finding more and more thoughtful folks talking about filtering and responsibility and what/how/why we should be teaching our students about this, so I just wanted to add to my previous two posts by pointing to a few more resources.

First, Kimberly Moritz over on LeaderTalk (if you’re not subscribed to LeaderTalk, go do it right now):

How do we do more to educate our parents and students about the danger of this sort of personal exploitation while encouraging teachers and students to utilize all that is good about the web? In my experience, the response is often that adults conclude the web is a bad thing all together, because if its misuse in a case like this one.

As an adult learner, I have no problem discriminating, considering the source, looking at the possible bias. I have no problem avoiding the million and one websites out there that focus on nonsense. I don't think blocking access to the web at school is going to teach our kids how to do those things. I'm certain that opening it up completely to students who are still developing their good sense and judgment isn't the answer either.

Carolyn Foote adds to her earlier thoughts:

ALA quotes the National Research Council whose report insightfully points out:

“Swimming pools can be dangerous for children. To protect them, one can install locks, put up fences, and deploy pool alarms. All these measures are helpful, but by far the most important thing that one can do for one’s children is to teach them to swim.”

So, what can we do? Some ideas (feel free to add to these):

1. Create a committee to collaborate on the filtering decision-making process. While the day-to-day decisions will probably have to be made by one person, the general policy decisions can be reviewed quarterly to make sure that the responsibility for the decision making is shared. This removes pressure from one individual, as well as taking into account differing philosophies and experience in the district. (I think such a committee should include teachers, tech directors, librarians, an administrator, IT people, etc.) Gathering all the parties also has the added benefit of starting a shared conversation about technology use.

2. Develop a quick and timely process for responding to teacher requests for unfiltering sites. If the process is not timely, teachers will “give up,” thus essentially “censoring” the site.

3. Advocate a professional approach for staff. It is likely to be appropriate to provide less filtering to staff than to students. Most filters allow for this. No more than we would penalize an entire class for 2 misbehaving students should we penalize an entire staff or student body for a few who do not observe the AUP policies.

4. Understand that there is a difference between classroom management and filtering. (This is part of the purpose of having a committee approach or a process for unfiltering sites.) If students are misusing computer resources, this is a discipline problem, not cause to discipline all students by filtering a site. If students are giggling and hiding a book on sex education in each other’s backpacks as a joke, I don’t remove it for the whole campus. I deal with those students.

5. Develop a policy and atmosphere that treats students and staff with respect. Again, the majority of your students and staff deserve that.

6. Become very familiar with the laws involved. For example, the law does allow for the filter to be unblocked so teachers can use sites for bona fide research. In how many districts is this policy not being followed? or is so time consuming and slow that the point of need passes?

7. Promote the idea of intellectual freedom on your campus. Your librarian can be an ally in that.

And in the comments on Carolyn’s post, Doug Johnson points us to an article he wrote back in 2005. I would hope that the filters have improved since the research the led to the following statistics was done, but I wonder if anyone has any more recent studies that would be helpful as we think about this.

Studies, like those of the Electronic Freedom Foundation (2003) that examined nearly a million web pages, fueled our concern. The researchers found the following:

* For every web page blocked as advertised, blocking software blocks one or more web pages inappropriately. 97-99% of the web pages blocked were done so using non-standard, discretionary, and potentially illegal criteria beyond what is required by CIPA.

* Internet blocking software was not able to detect and protect students from access to many of the apparently pornographic sites that appeared in search results related to state-mandated curriculums.

. . . Another study of Internet filtering conducted by the Electronic Freedom Foundation (2002) revealed some other interesting numbers:

* Schools that implement Internet blocking software with the least restrictive settings will block between .5% and 5% of search results based on state-mandated curriculum topics.

* Schools that implement Internet blocking software with the most restrictive settings will block up to 70% of search results based on state-mandated curriculum topics.

Another study conducted by the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School (JAMA, 2002) examined how well seven Internet filters blocked health information for teens at settings from least restrictive to very restrictive. They found that at the least restrictive setting only 1.4% of the health information sites were blocked and 87% of the pornography sites were blocked. At the most restrictive setting, 24% of the health information sites were blocked with still only 91% of the pornography sites blocked.

Doug delineates some of the decisions they made to try to protect intellectual freedom yet still protect their students.

1. We based our choice of filters not on cost or convenience, but on features and customizability, and chose the least restrictive settings of the installed filter.

2. We generously use the override lists in our Internet filter; and we make sure media specialists can override the filter or have access to a machine that is completely unblocked in each media center so that questionably blocked sites can be reviewed and immediately accessed by staff and students if found to be useful.

3. We treat requests for the blocking of specific websites like we would any other material challenge.

4. We take a proactive approach to ensuring good Internet use by students.

He expands on all this in that article, so I’d highly recommend you visit and read the entire article.

Overall, my district has done a good job with this, implementing many of Doug's suggestions above. I obviously disagree with the decision they’ve made about YouTube and similar video sites, and I think we have some issues with “timely” responses since our committee only meets quarterly, but those are relatively minor complaints compared to what folks in most districts are going through.

But I still have a basic concern over the idea of the filter (in its present incarnation) in the first place. That some outside, not-educationally-focused company that must answer to its shareholders, not our stakeholders, is making decisions about what is appropriate for our students to see and not see – and then implementing those decisions with a tool that’s not up to the task at a granular-enough level.

And I also question the basic assumption that so many folks are apparently making that our students are not capable of making good decisions on their own, that if they see an inappropriate thumbnail on YouTube that one of two things will happen. Either they will be irreparably harmed by seeing the thumbnail itself, or they will feel compelled to click on the thumbnail and watch the inappropriate video, and then be irreparably harmed.

I think our students can handle more responsibility than that, that more often than not they will make the right decision. As I’ve said before,

Our philosophy is to have high expectations for our students, to educate them to behave ethically, responsibly and safely and then expect that they will do the right thing. When they don’t, they know we’ll have a conversation and try to learn from the mistake, but we don’t assume they are going to screw up. In other words, our philosophy has been to educate, not ban.

At my school, at least, that approach seems to work well in many, many different areas, so why should we treat this one differently?

Finally, to go back to Doug Johnson’s words:

There is long held belief in libraryland that one selects a resource on the basis of it having some things of value rather than censor a resource based on it having some parts without value or which might possibly cause offense.

I guess I still fall firmly in the camp that believes we shouldn’t block an entire site simply because some of the content might cause offense. I believe that not only disrespects our students and compromises their education, but is also a very slippery slope . . .

More Thoughts On Filtering

My last post finished with a tame (for me) rant about Internet filtering, and specifically that YouTube and other similar sites are currently blocked in my district. Carolyn Foote – in the comments – pointed me to some parallel conversations going on. (Thanks, Carolyn, since I’m way behind in my aggregator.) For those of you who are interested in this topic, let me point you to a few of them.

First, Doug Johnson has a self-described rant of his own:

There is long held belief in libraryland that one selects a resource on the basis of it having some things of value rather than censored a resource based on it having some parts without value or which might possibly cause offense. In choosing to block YouTube, you are a censor. You violate your staff's and students' intellectual freedom, their rights to view. By arbitratily blocking other sites, you are violating your staff's and students' right to read. You are denying them their rights accorded by the First Amendment.

Doug’s post appears to have been spurred at least in part by this post by Miguel Guhlin:

Over the last two weeks, there's been a rash of emails from Texas Tech Directors asking, "How do you handle the use of YouTube videos by instructional staff?" Often, YouTube is blocked in school districts, but teachers (and others) find they want to use the content in their lessons. I enjoyed responding to these questions by other tech directors by pointing them to different resources they could use to get YouTube videos and save them to their computers.

You should also check out Miguel’s post for one way to fairly easily save videos from YouTube and similar sites locally. I have found several ways to do this, but this may be the simplest and the one least likely to get broken by updates to the hosting site (since Zamzar will presumably respond quickly to changes). (Note that you still have to be able to access the video site to get the URL of the particular video you want, so that requires accessing from home or overriding the filter at school if you have that option.)

A related post by Miguel then led me to two posts, one by Tim Stahmer:

In my spare time this week I’ve been submitting requests to have a long list of sites unblocked (fortunately, my boss approved them) but it’s not that effort that bothers me.

It’s the totally inconsistent classification and blocking of web sites which is very much symptomatic of the arbitrary, sometimes knee-jerk rules we often impose on students in the name of keeping them safe.

Instead of using the electronic filters sparingly (there are certainly sites that need to be kept out of the classroom) and then teaching the kids how to evaluate and filter the rest for themselves, we throw up a porous chain-link fence, offering administrators a false sense of security.

And, from a comment on Miguel's post, this post by Kurt Paccio:

I am a primary decision maker for web content filtering in a school. We continually see comments with the groans, and the sighs about schools who "over filter" or block entire sites. We also hear the frequent "they don't get it!" label slapped onto the decision makers.

I'd like to point out something of interest. Not one of those who sigh or are critical of filtering decisions has their job on the line should Johnny access inappropriate content. Would those who are frustrated sit beside me in court or defend me in the court of public opinion? They certainly would not have to sit in the principal's office and explain to the sobbing mother who is clutching her book of faith.

For those who can't believe that YouTube is blocked, have you approached the Superintendent and volunteered to assume liability for the District should a student, parent, or family launch a lawsuit? As it stands today, many AUPs identify the Technology Coordinator, Technology Director, or Superintendent as the individual responsible for safeguarding students.

The comment that led me to Kurt’s post was by Jim Gates, who adds to the conversation (coming full circle by talking about my post) with this post:

What's that? Allow teachers to override the filter? HERESY? An OUTRAGE? Impossible?... WONDERFUL! FANTASTIC! Imagine giving control of the internet to those people with whom we are entrusting our children and assuming that they will use good judgement in their choices. What's the worst consequence of this great idea? You might have a teacher who uses poor judgement, or you may have one who decides to follow her stocks all day long or to monitor their ebay account. What then? I liked what one principal said in a meeting recently. He said, "I want to KNOW which teachers are doing that when they should be teaching a class. At least that way I can get rid of them. But, to restrict the Internet to such a point that it interferes with the education we're trying to provide to our students just to protect the teachers from themselves doesn't make sense."

And then this article came to me in the old fashioned way via email (yes, email delivery of a link to a web page is now “old-fashioned,” if not downright quaint):

The University of California, Berkeley, is posting course lectures and other campus happenings on YouTube.

Finally, Carolyn herself had a post recently where she talked about similar issues:

I find it upsetting because there are teachers out there who are committed and excited about education, and who really want to bridge the gap between the world many of their students live in (wired, connected, “on all the time”) and the world of education(me being one of those teachers). These teachers are pushing the envelope, eagerly trying new things, and trying to use the best tools they can find to connect their students with a world beyond the classroom walls.

Yet too many of these teachers are met with roadblocks, and an ever mounting frustration at being unable to convince administrators or their IT department, or their district leaders..or someone in their district, that what they are doing can be done in a safe manner and is valuable, very valuable for their students.

So my fear is, naturally, that we are going to lose some of the best teachers we have in the country. Because you can only stand expending half your energies “convincing” people for so long. And no one finds it rewarding to have their genuine love and enthusiasm for teaching reined in and constantly met with roadblocks.

And I’m sure there are many, many others. But this is just one set of examples of the many good conversations going on as we try to figure out how best to meet the needs of our students.