[Year 12 IT Apps] OT Internet Access

[Russell Edwards]

On 12/01/2008, at 1:26 PM, murch at tpg.com.au wrote:

> Hello all. We have just changed service providers and both staff and  
> students have been blocked
> from so many sites. Staff have to get the technicians to give them  
> access to sites that they may
> want. So, we have different access rights but only on individual  
> requests. It is so annoying
> because most of the web 2.0 that I want to use is blocked.


It sounds like you might be on an Education Channel-only policy for  
students, as is my school.  It is a whitelist filter: everything is  
blocked by default, only hand-selected sites are allowed. They won't  
answer my emails for figures but based on what I could dig up, about  
99.8% of sites are blocked. It is appalling and by no stretch of the  
imagination should be referred to as "internet" provision.  I could go  
on and on and on about why it's bad, specifically how it goes against  
VELS and PoLT and every other fashionable buzzword, and have done so.   
At my school we convinced everyone who needed to be convinced but in  
the end it comes down to liability, and the policy remains.

The EC-only policy should be officially deprecated or banned by the  
department but instead they encourage it. As far as I can tell it is  
0% driven by pedagogy, 0% by genuine concern for student welfare, and  
100% legal backside-covering.  Both the Department and principals/ 
schools/technicians are trying to duck liability. Maybe IT teachers  
should encourage parents to take a class action against the Department  
for *not* providing proper internet connectivity. That might shake  
some sense into them.

Russell Edwards
Whittlesea Secondary College