The ed tech blogosphere is buzzing about this so I feel compelled to add my $0.02.
Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick (R. of PA) has introduced legislation called the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA). I saw the news first in an article at News.com entitled Congress targets social network sites. (You’ll find the actual bill online in PDF form here.)
I won’t summarize the entire article here since you can read the News.com site and the bill itself for the details. The purpose of the bill is to protect students by forcing schools and libraries that receive federal funding to block access to commercial social networking Websites or chatrooms where students may encounter online predators. Who wouldn’t support legislation like that? Obviously, supporters of the bill think that their suburban constituents would appreciate the extra protection at their childrens’ schools. (I am trying so hard not to be sarcastic here.)
I should say first that this legislation would have little or no immediate impact on instruction in my school district. We don’t have teachers using these sites with their students. And, frankly, it’s probably not a good idea for schools to use 3rd-party sites like MySpace et al. for official purposes anyway since all kinds of liability issues pop up immediately. My preference has always been to run the software on our own server so that we can provide proper supervision.
That said, Rep. Fitzpatrick clearly doesn’t get it. Let me count the ways.
- The law is simply unenforceable. Students will find open proxies for bypassing content filters faster than they can be blocked. (See Google search results for a quick list of anonymizing proxies.)
- The bill is way too broad. It defines “commerical social networking Website” as any site that “allows users to create web pages or profiles that provide information about themselves and are available to other users; and offers a mechanism for communication with other users, such as a forum, chat room, email, or instant messenger.” That definition covers too much ground.
- The very technologies that this bill would prohibit are the future of the online world. I suspect that Rep. Fitzpatrick is under the impression that having students use Microsoft PowerPoint to do presentations is an example of cutting-edge educational technology.
- The bill would allow a school or library to disable the filtering during adult supervision or for educational use. That’s an exemption that isn’t really an exemption. How would that process be managed in a busy school? It wouldn’t happen. The filters would never get disabled.
- If students are at risk from online predators, it’s not typically during school hours. I understand that Congress can’t legislate how parents supervise their childrens’ computer use, but this seems like a solution pointed in the wrong direction.
- The social networking phenomenon is too new to know how it’s going to play out in the culture. This law seems like half-cocked response targeted for short-term political gain. That’s a bad way to legislate regardless of the issue.
- Blocking sites like these only serves to convince students that what they do in school isn’t “real life.” Isn’t it hard enough already to keep students engaged?
It will be interesting to see how all this shakes out.
Mobilize.org is launching a new campaign in response to Congress’ attempt to censor the communication of our generation. We have created the action alert below and built a website, http://www.mobilize.org/SOS. We are hoping to get as much grassroots action as possible around this important issue, especially from the online community.
Breaking News:
Legislation introduced this week will ban social networking, even sites used for educational and professional opportunities. What’s next? HR5319 will censor the communication of our generation and tell us who we can talk to, when and how. Tell Congress that social networking is a movement that we built, a movement that we are going to fight for.
Visit http://www.mobilize.org/SOS, take action, tell your friends and get mad.
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The bill blocks the use of these sites in public libraries, which is for many, the only access that they have to a computer. Our hope is to be able to amend the bill to take these facts into consideration. We agree that there need to be safeguards put in place for “sexual predators” and any of other crimes that might occur because of the accessibility of information on these sites, but to ban them in schools (including using school computers afterschool) and public libraries, is for many – banning social networking.
I am open to suggestions on how we should better craft our message to convey these facts and express the urgency of this campaign. Today is the first business day that we’ve been able to talk to people about it, as we just found out about it on Friday.
It is disturbing to see this happening. I would think it has to be mostly political posturing. Social networking has become an aspect of “normal” life for teens and for young adults. I just did a brief study today of the demographics of MySpace (just a small sampling), and I was surprised to find that teens actually are not the primary active users on MySpace. People in their twenties appear to make up about 50% of the people who have accounts and have used them in the past few weeks.
My wife and I have spent the last 4 months studying MySpace in depth, and coming up with a set of lessons and practices to enable teens to use it safely and responsibly. We’ve got a 38-page freely downloadable and distributable PDF “concise guide” to MySpace available on our web site. Plus, our book “MySpace Safety: 51 Tips for Teens and Parents” will be available this month.
The “ban MySpace” (and all social networking sites) attitude can’t work, because it’s like saying “let’s ban normalcy”… Parents/teachers/politicians need to “get with it” — it’s a new world, it’s real, it’s here, it’s vital, it’s not going away. Adults need to get involved, not try to throw a blanket over this because they don’t want to understand it…
I couldn’t agree with you more. I’m a senior English Ed major, and I just took a class on integrating technology and composition in the classroom in which we used social networking sites throughout the semester. Admittedly, I was impressed by the way that we were actually able to continue discussions that started in class through blogs, discussion boards, instant messaging, and, in some cases, even through sites like MySpace. We were able to exchange ideas, take learning a step further, create a collective knowledge pool, and really establish a sense of community through our use of social networking. If DOPA passes, it will prevent primary and secondary students from having these kinds of educational opportunities. Fitzpatrick’s intentions might be good, but his bill will be bad for education (not to mention civil liberties).