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Should Schools Block Sites Like Wikipedia?
Londovir asks: "Recently, our school board made the decision to block Wikipedia from our school district's WAN system. This was a complete block — there aren't even provisions in place for teachers or administrators to input a password to bypass the restriction. The reason given was that Wikipedia (being user created and edited) did not represent a credible or reliable source of information for schools. Should we block sites such as Wikipedia because students may be exposed to misinformation, or should we encourage sites such as Wikipedia as an outlet for students to investigate and determine the validity of the information?"
I would like to see the same board underline how cooperate owned news media, and human written reference material are that much more reliable that partially peer reviewed, but publicly refutable medium. I am in no way denying the obvious problems with Wikipedia.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
How about, "the faster we hit rock bottom, the sooner the mobs with pitchforks will rise up?"
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
I work in a large school district IT Department. We block plenty of sites, including MySpace and Facebook, (though we don't block Wikipedia).
Generally, the feeling among us here is that if we receive a complain about a website, we will examine it. We won't block non-porn sites until we receive complaints, and the website has to have no educational value for us to consider blocking.
FanFictionRecs.net
Our school district "blocks" sites like LiveJournal and MySpace. This provides our student body with an excellent education in some branches of computer science - like tunnelling, overseas proxy servers, and anonymous browsing in general.
Besides, to state the obvious, students generally do their homework papers at home - where Wikipedia is freely available.