Last year, my office (at the local School Board) received a complaint from a teacher who's blog website had been blocked by our district's Information Technology (ITS) department. In my quest to help the teacher restore access to her site through our school computers, I was provided with a great deal of quite interesting information from our professional staff on the reasoning behind blocking sites. Below are some excerpts from the responses I received.
"Blog servers are particularly troublesome for the District because if they are not managed tightly, students can create inappropriate sites. This is why Facebook and MySpace are blocked. Specifically, we have seen an increase in the number of proxy sites being created and used by students on servers that were supposed to be only for blogging, and there has been an increase in proxy traffic recently. As you know, proxy sites allow students to bypass the District’s Internet content filter. Our automated systems block sites that are generating proxy traffic, and this blocking occasionally extends to an entire blog server.
In one case, a site being used by some teachers for class work called blogspot.com had multiple proxy sites, probably created by students, and needed to be blocked. In addition, our filter service occasionally blocks a server without our being aware of it. That is what happened to the edublogs.org server. Currently, we are getting between 50 and 100 new requests a week to unblock/block sites, and each must be reviewed for the appropriateness of the request before taking action, which takes time and staff resources.
As an alternative to using the edublogs.org site, the District has free collaboration sites set up in the Portal to allow classes to work in a blogging environment. This capability will soon be upgraded as we go to the latest version of Microsoft SharePoint. In addition, ITS is working with other departments to create a list of approved/ recommended blog sites to avoid the kinds of issues described above. Specifically, we need to find sites that will prevent students from adding inappropriate content or creating sites with inappropriate uses, like proxies."
[This was the official response provided by the District Director of ITS]
This was a more informal response from a member of the District's ITS team:
"Section I–E of our district policy specifically discusses our required compliance with the federal Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA). CIPA itself provides for the loss of federal funding, including E-Rate, if we are found to not be in compliance. We have had E-Rate auditors go to a school, sit down at a computer in the media center and try to go to a site that should be blocked, so we know they are watching.
There are other reasons besides objectionable material for sites to be blocked. Game sites, hacker sites, sites providing download capabilities (especially for copyrighted material, like MP3 audio files and MP4 video files), sites known to be infected, and sites with streaming video or audio (like YouTube), which consume an inordinate amount of bandwidth to the point that access for everybody slows to a crawl. We cannot afford to provide unlimited bandwidth. Sites like Facebook and MySpace are also blocked, even for teachers and administrators (at the Police Dept.’s request).
We use a service that maintains a list of sites that should be blocked, but we do have a process to request that a site be blocked, or unblocked. Users can to send an e-mail with a link to the site and their request will be evaluated. We can also turn on minimum filtering for specific computers when there is a business or educational need. For instance, some members of the Police Department need to be able to view sites that contain information about explosives which would normally be blocked."
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