Over the next two weeks, Portland’s school district will install filtering software on laptops issued to high school students, in order to block access to pornography, social networking sites and video streaming sites when the laptops are at home.
The district will install filtering software made by Sophos, an Internet security company based in Boston. The software will be downloaded automatically when students boot up their computers at school. Only when students get home will they discover that their lives have changed in a big way.
No longer will they have access to social networking sites like Facebook and video-streaming sites like Hulu and YouTube. Also blocked will be forums and news groups, games, dating sites, gambling sites and chat rooms. – The Portland Press Herald
This will prove to be the wrong approach. It is incredible how a School District can make this kind of decision. It is further evidence that migrating from old ways of thinking in business and education will take considerable effort and visionary thinking. Today learning can be reinforced online.
