Today is the first Key Contacts meeting that we’ve had since I joined the team. I’m on my way to Edinburgh to meet up with my colleagues in the Glow Team and representatives from each of the 32 local authorities around Scotland involved in the Glow project.

I used to really get a lot out of these meetings when I worked for a local authority, so it’ll be a great opportunity to find out what has been happening out there around the country.

It’s always a shame that we have to wait to share with each other at these meetings. The good news is though that as of today, there will be a Glow Group for the Key Contacts to share and keep up to speed with developments inbetween the national meetings.

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All this discussion around websense and whitelisting/filtering in general makes me think that we’re missing the point somehow.

Remember back when you saw your first pupil bring a mobile phone into school? You, like me, probably thought ‘their parents have too much money’, and ‘not to worry, it’ll never catch on’. Then ‘pay as you go’ tarrifs appeared, and there was effectively no barrier for kids to have access to this technology. £20 could get you an entry level phone, and a further £10 could get you a pay as you go SIM card with some credit. When I say ‘no barrier’, I mean it – even kids from the lowest income families have phones owing to the socail pressure to have one. Whilst £30 might be a lot of money to familes on the lowest income, it never ceases to amaze me what these kids would appear in school with after Christmas.

Well folks, the next phase of this technological development is upon us. There is now 3G broadband available on ‘pay as you go’ tarrifs. How many kids have already got this? I know what you’re thinking – ‘their parents have too much money’, or ‘not to worry, it’ll never catch on’… but we’ve been here before, right? Any kid with their own laptop could be surfing the web in your school outwith your protected and filtered network. The security conscious amongst you will be thinking how you could solve this problem – you’d recognise a kid with a 3G card, as it’d be sticking out the side of the computer. Not so I’m afraid – a minute surfing reveals how easy it is to solder the card inside your laptop case (and, yes, kids are this enterprising) or better still, some laptops come with a 3G card in them already!

I think you can fairly safely guarantee that it will catch on, and we need to think very seriously about what we do with this knowledge. Whitelist anybody?

People can, and do circumvent technological filters/barriers to get to what they want. Perhaps it’s time we put as much thought, time and finance into teaching information literacy as we do employing technological barriers to content, then we’d be in a better position to educate those in our charge about safe appropriate use of the net.

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Suprised (and a bit alarmed) to read the other day that Highland Council’s Education Department is blocking blogs and other such web 2.0 sites through its Websense filtering system.

Not surprised that a council is blocking such sites, (many other Scottish councils use Websense as their filtering mechanism) but more surprised that it was blocking my own site.

When I started keeping a blog, I used blogger.com and deployed frames on my site to incorporate it for visitors into my wider website. After a bit of thought, I realised it would be better to host the blog element myself and stop this part of my site being blocked by filtering systems.

All well and good I thought, until the other day, with the revelation about websense. Obviously (or hopefully!) this is blocking by content, rather than domain?

What a shame, and what a missed opportunity. Not just in blocking my site, but by blocking the numerous other bloggers out there in education – engaged in meaningful professional dialogue and development.

Don’t think I’m getting at Highland here – I’ve always found Highland to be luminaries in education. My point rather is this – many councils employ filtering technology. BUT… did you know you can request that sites are ‘unblocked’? Most councils wil have in place a system that  allows users to request that sites be freed up to be viewed. If you hear of situations where educationally valid sites are being blocked by a filter, get in touch with the people that run the filter locally – they may just be able to change things for you

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