In the ’50s it was the malt shop. In the early 21st century, it’s the social Web. But unlike the malt shops of “Happy Days,” today’s online teen hangouts have an unsavory side that have parents and educators reaching for the tools of censorship to protect kids from the worst of their own nature and, more seriously, from falling prey to predators.
In the middle of this tug of war between adult authority and its plugged-in progeny is the R.I. Network for Educational Technology, a nonprofit that supports the technology needs of the state’s 36 school districts.
When schools want specific Internet content blocked, they call RINET, whose point guard for content filtering is Pam Christman, director of technology programs and network services. Christman spoke with the Providence Business News about RINET’s role in reining in the wired generation.
PBN: MySpace, which has a large youth audience, has received a lot of attention lately as a dangerous place for kids. There are lots of Web sites that offer the same kinds of services – personal Web pages, Web logs, online photo albums and the like – but 80 percent of the state’s schools are blocking access to MySpace. Why do you think MySpace has been singled out?
CHRISTMAN: It’s because of the popularity of that site among teenagers. There have been quite a few incidents, so school districts have had requests from parents, school committees and teachers when they’ve seen usage of the site.
Some folks want to block MySpace completely until they’ve had a chance to make presentations to parents. All around the state, superintendents and technology directors are making presentations to parents’ groups and PTOs and PTAs and school committees to explain what this is. The idea is to block MySpace quickly and then start a larger discussion about blogs in general and how to deal with it at home and at school.
PBN: What incidents have prompted this concern?
CHRISTMAN: A student will put a picture of his girlfriend or her boyfriend in a compromising position, pictures of friends drinking.
PBN: In other words, complaints about pranks, not predators?
CHRISTMAN: I haven’t heard any reports of predators. You hear that on the news. Once people start seeing that, they think, “Oh, my gosh, my kids are on this site.”
PBN: How effective are filters in controlling unsavory Internet content?
CHRISTMAN: No filter is going to be 100 percent effective. New sites come up every day so some things are going to get through. That’s where education and supervision come into play.
PBN: What kind of refinements have you seen in filtering since you first started using it?
CHRISTMAN: When we first started, there weren’t options to deal with some of the more sophisticated chat clients. Originally, the clients operated on a single port. When filters began blocking that port, clients were written to randomize port access so you couldn’t block a chat based on one port. You had to start looking for patterns. Proxying is another technique used by students to get around filters. So now filters look for proxy patterns and block them.
PBN: How do proxies work?
CHRISTMAN: They make you appear as if you’re not going through the school network to access a site. There are public proxies you can go to on the Net from where you can perform searches outside a system’s filters. At first, the filters created lists of public proxy sites and blocked them. So people began creating proxy sites on the fly. Then the filter makers modified their software to recognize proxy patterns and block any site that fit those patterns.
PBN: Do you supervise your children’s Internet usage at home?
CHRISTMAN: Without a doubt. Our PC sits in the middle of our living room. I had it in the basement until they started getting online. Younger kids can get to sites by accident, and older kids can be led down paths that you may not want them to go down.
PBN: According to your statistics, 40 percent of the state’s school districts are blocking blogging sites. Even if that isn’t a violation of free speech, isn’t it robbing kids of one of the primary communication tools of their generation?
CHRISTMAN: There are certainly free-speech questions, but we want to stay out of that. What we’re doing is try to help the districts meet a mandate with some technology that can best be provided collaboratively and centrally
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PBN: What do you think will be the upshot of the MySpace controversy?
CHRISTMAN: What I fervently hope comes out of this is education and supervision of children so parents become aware of what is actually out there. If this one issue is what it takes to bring parents together to hear about the breadth of issues, then that’s a good thing.
