When I read about the techniques Chinese bloggers were using to get the word out, I was reminded of my middle school students dying to listen to their music or get to their myspace page from behind the district’s firewall. District official’s no doubt would bristle at the analogy, but I’m sure that the Chinese officials also believe that they are justified using their firewall to protect their users from the great harm of an unregulated Internet. And legally speaking Public Ed is required to take whatever measures necessary to protect minors from exposure to potentially harmful material. Question is, when dealing with middle and high school students specifically, whether any firewall is strong enough and whether there are much more meaningful, inexpensive way to protect students from inappropriate content and the network infrastructure from attack and abuse. Included in my TCO (total cost of operation) analysis is the expense of not using the energy, ingenuity and genius of these students and the cost of keeping the disenfranchised disenfranchised.

Technorati Tags: blogs, community, gaming, internet, kids, media, china, teaching, thesystem, work

Then again, when I think of it, I was the one to use the same “text stored as a graphic” technique used by the dissidents, but with my middle school students when I wanted to give them something to type and yet prevent them from just copying and pasting the text. “JPG” text FTW. Of course some of the kids figured out that all they needed to do was to strike a deal with one of their more-keyboard savvy classmates to give them a copy of the completed assignment. Damn tricky students. But the assignment really wasn’t worth me investing any greater effort to thwart their work-around. I doubt the district or Chinese officials would come to the same conclusions. jbb

Music/Podcast: Systm – Build Your Own NAS from the album “Systm (Small Quicktime)” by Revision3