Slashdot Mirror
Email (and Filters) for all Australian schools
Tom Davies writes: "Every student and teacher in the state of New South Wales will have an email address and web access by March. And porn filtering to go with it, according to this article in the Sydney Morning Herald."
It's probably also worth pointing out that
Queensland has had a related facility for
blocking unwanted sites for some time, although
it can be micromanaged at the school administrator
level if desired. From experience, one popular use
is simply to stop massive haemorrhaging of $$ due
to downloading from popular software archives(!)
Ian
As systems administrator of Bendigo Senior Secondary College, (Victoria, Australia) [Just below NSW, only better (jk)], I'd like to say all students have unfiltered net access, and have had such for >6 years now; and we have no intentions to start censoring what our students are able to see.
[For the record, systems are in place to track usage, and people are punished for looking up porn n stuff... but there's no censorship or filtering.]
... It's also very nice to see NSW giving students free email addresses... we've only done that for 2 years.
I wonder how much the NSW gov't is charging schools for this honor? Especially since Telstra (the beast of telco in au) has [basically] applied they're patented '3gb cap' to schools too.
Note that Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) is not the same as, or even associated with, the US's very own well-known Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
And, sigh, my sig is so poignant these days :-(
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Amen on that. I work in a university library and people believe that it is their god-given right to look at all the goatse.cx they can fit on their screens.
Of course, telling them that the computers where bought with student funds and not gov't funds, meaning we can censor them, usually gets an annoyed response. Just like what is happening with this topic.
People like this boggle my mind. I am a member of the ACLU allright? It's not like I don't believe in free speech and all the men's gaping a**holes you can see, but not in a student-funded library intended for academic use only OR in schools where kids should be learning - not masturbating to the latest photoshopped Britney Spears pr0n.
People should be HAPPY that they decided to blacklist the stuff and not simply filter it (shudder, filtering software is horrid, horrid stuff) which would honestly hurt kids freedom of speach. Really, this isn't very much of an issue. You are in school to learn, not to loook at all the porn you can handle.
I completed high school just over a year ago in Victoria, the other major Australian state.
This is nothing new in Victoria. New South Wales is just catching up.
The IT teacher used to gloat about being "god" and how she could (and did) read any e-mail, and about the filters setup so anything with swearing would be blocked and redirected to her. High school age kids throw words like "shit" and "fuck" around like nothing, so this was a little unfair, especially considering it wasn't documented until a year later.
The web access was worse. They had this state-wide thing called EduCache. It was just a great big filter, allowing only officially checked websites in. It was at the school's discression to activate it; you can guess our school had it on. (I also won't mention how this made the web virtually useless for most students, and I spent half a year teaching people how to change their proxy settings to bypass it. But I digress.)
Students could submit sites to this cache. I requested many tech sites, from here at Slashdot, to Be Inc, to Enlightenment, just to name the ones I remember. I also tried to add The Sync, just for Geeks in Space. It was rejected. Probably something to do with JenniCam...
Look, these schools don't care about privacy. Eventually, they made students sign sheets saying they wouldn't do bad things. Bad things like look up porn or submit anything anonymously to the net. By this stage, I had 12 months left at the school, and refused to sign. Didn't use a school computer for a year (well, not with my own account at least...)
Oh, and before you think I was some rebel kid hacking the school network; I wasn't. I was one of 3 students that sat in on the IT committee meetings. They were all just too busy bickering about their different areas of education to do anything constructive.
Sorry, ranting. Probably bad grammar from the rush. I just don't seen this as a surprise.
(I'll leave the 'My IT teacher called a mouse a GUI' and the I got in trouble for opening a command prompt in NT, because I was "accessing DOS"' rants for another day.)
- Personalised email accounts for teachers and students.
- Filtered Internet access.
- Web facilities for individuals, schools and colleges.
Student discussion groups.
- Remote access from any location.
24 hour technical support.
The filtering and web access is nothing new, with almost all schools in Australia already having something like that.The interesting thing here is not the censorship but the fact that all the students in the entire state will have email addresses. This could significantly change the way a lot of services in a school operate. Just like in a university or corporation, messages, overdue notices, feedback on assessment and reminders could all be easily send electronically. Students will have the opportunity to communicate with their teachers, ask questions, etc without having to get the teacher's attention when it may not be convenient.
I think that this project, properly implemented could have far ranging possibilites for improving communication in schools.
For more info, the NSW Education Department's page about the topic is located at: http://www.dse.nsw.edu.au/direction/e_classroom/i
Its just 1 state. sheeesh!
The offerings of the companies involved really need to be improved; I can't do most of the work that I need to do (scanning security sites, downloading patches) either because the sites are blocked; or the link is too damn slow to grab patches. Quite frequently, the lag can jump to >200 seconds over the link.
Just my A$0.02...