let us live our lives!

I’m angry – really angry. I’ve tried looking at it for every point of view, tried to work out their thought process, but I give up. The powers that be in terms of IT provision in Northern Ireland Education have decided that Blogger is too much of a risk to young minds and blocked it from the C2K network. This means that anyone trying to access a Blogger or Blogspot blog from any school in Northern Ireland will be shown a blocked access page instead.

I am appalled. As an English teacher I teach the variety and uses of blogs, I encouraged pupils to express themselves using blogs, I used blogs to look at the concept of writing for a specific audience. Now I am completely unable to look up any of my trusted sites.

It’s not just blogging that is suffering from C2k blocking. When I was a learning support teacher I regularly used word games from the East of the Web website. These were incredibly useful and fun ways to improve all kinds of literacy skills. Within six months of discovering them I lost them again – apparently in their clampdown on gaming sites East of the Web got the chop again. Surely even the IT geeks in Belfast running our network can distinguish between educational games and games where little cartoon tanks firing atom bombs at each other – maybe then they can explain why my pupils can play the later but not the former.

From a personal point of view it’s a pain in the arse as well. For the better part of two years I’ve been adding posts to ToaSNT during my lunches and free periods. Now that’s impossible – well almost.

In their efforts to avoid our impressionable young folks seeing anything with bad language, sex or violence C2K have blocked even the tamest of sites. By blocking hardcore porn the pupils moved to softcore, by blocking that the pupils moved onto ‘mild references to’, when all of that got blocked pupils moved into chat rooms. But, as we all know, chat rooms are evil and eventually got blocked. The pupils then moved into social interaction sites. Then Bebo and Myspace made headline news and Youtube became the home of happy slapping – so they got banned. This meant that anything that allowed pupils to upload photos, share ideas or actually express an opinion (horror!) had to be blocked and so we get to wave goodbye to blogs – well almost.

You see, here’s the thing. With everything of interest blocked the pupils had to get inventive. Every week they discover a new proxy site and, before it gets blocked, use it to check out their bebo pages and prank youtubes. Of course the proxies aren’t exactly discerning types and so we see the return of hardcore porn and sickening violence.

Ironic, eh?

So C2K please, for the sake of my sanity and a sex ed teacher’s ability to research lesson plans, get off your power filled, litigation fearing censor fest and give us a system that lets us teach… and maybe write the odd blog entry during our frees.