CIPA, Filters, and Policies--OH MY!

I think that if this policy is properly implemented, it can be a very useful tool in schools and libraries. Although I doubt that children would purposely look up explicit content at school, it is possible that they could stumble upon it by accident. CIPA protects them from this and assures that they must use the computers for educational purposes.

Granted, there are ways around this. I'm sure most or all of us have previously used a proxy server to access internet pages that our school deemed inappropriate. More often than not, those pages were probably Myspace or Facebook. But, not all children know these tricks and chances are, even if they do, the sites that they access without protection will only be as harmless as Facebook.

Regardless of how harmless the sites children would visit if they got around a filter might be, the hope is that they don't stray from educational content. CIPA doesn't just filter out potentially harmful sites, it ensures that schoolwork is done on school computers. Let's face it, no matter how important we all thought (and maybe still think) that Facebook is in our daily lives, we can live without it for a few hours a day. Learning should definitely take precedence, and CIPA works towards accomplishing that goal.

It isn't quite as simple as that though. CIPA filters have a tendency to block sites that are educational, simply because they contain words that have been flagged as inappropriate. As a child, I found this side effect extremely annoying, which only made me want to procrastinate my paper more. As a teen in high school, not being able to look things up because of filters on the computers made me feel like I was being treated as a child when I shouldn't have been. Knowing that these filters can be modified and even shut off eases my concerns a bit though. Unfortunately, I didn't know that changes could be made to the filters until it was too late (about a week ago). I think an effort should be made to make children, teens, and even adults that utilize these public computers aware of the fact that the filters can be modified upon request--with a legitimate reason.