Love it… I’m at a global ed conference today, in an unnamed school board office, and everyone is in a plenary. I wanted to check a Facebook message, and blamo:

Web Page Blocked

You have tried to access a web page which is not accessible under the Peel District School Board’s Internet usage policy.

URL: www.facebook.com/login.php
Category: Master Deny List

Which is fine… cuz school boards block stuff. Pretty standard. Even the City of Toronto is now blocking Facebook for its employees (but not councillors… of course). So, just to see what else they were blocking, and the obvious suspects are out… myspace, friendster, orkut, linkedin, games.yahoo.com… basically the big social networking (but not blog, cuz i’m able to log into LJ??) sites and big game sites.

But guess what’s not blocked? Twitter, Plazes, upcoming.org, flickr… all the ‘little’ sites that haven’t been caught yet, but are just as ‘risky’ and ‘un-educational’. So students can still freely give away all their personal information to strangers, and use the intertubes for non-productive purposes.

Why don’t we just teach kids, you know… what you put on the internet is public, and you should be careful. It’s really pretty simple. And why can’t we recognize and take advantage of the educational potential (or at least attention-catching potential) of using some of these ‘inappropriate’ sites in schools? It seems way more effective than sorta half-assedly blocking the sites that could put them ‘at risk.’