A Custom Objectionable Word List Ate My Homework

theodp writes "Among the first three schools using Chromebooks for Education is the Merton Community School District, which decided to go Chromebook after the Wisconsin Dept. of Public Instruction (WDPI) issued a news release (created using PDFMaker for Word) announcing that all Wisconsin schools can have access to Google Apps for Education by simply downloading a Google Consent Form (Microsoft Word format, oddly) from the WDPI website, completing & signing it, and submitting it to Google. And to help get the schools going, a separate Wisconsin Google Apps for Education website aims to jumpstart things with weekly webinars, the first of which — Getting started with the Google Apps for Education Control Panel — shows school officials how they can sandbox 'Naughty Students' and filter objectionable content. While Google illustrates how a list of 'custom objectionable words' can be used to flag and/or block students' e-mail with some cute examples — different spellings of 'booger' and a regex to block variants like 'b00g3r' — things get considerably nastier in the real world, as this NSFW custom objectionable word list used by the North Canton City Schools shows."

Comments

Re:What an Unreadable and Horrible Summary

[The Snowman]

I have no idea what the story is here.

Schools are censoring students using Google Docs. If you click the last link and log in to your Google account, you will see the list of words:

anal [...etc etc...] whore

I can understand the school's desire to maintain a certain level of maturity, but this needs to be the job of the parents and teachers, not the technology. As a father of two boys, I want them to have the opportunity to act stupid, so I can correct them and tell them what is and is not appropriate. I don't want a computer enforcing that for me.

Re:I am the author of the spreadsheet in question

[betterunixthanunix]

you would be amazed at what was on the original lists

I am amazed at what remained on your list. What were you thinking? Not only did you block large numbers of works used in a typical biology textbook, you even managed to block words that would be relevant to bible discussions.

However as a school providing email to children, the consensus of our community to to provide some level of filtering.

So you are training your children to accept censorship and to run to authority figures whenever they need to discuss certain topics? If your school district were in a country like China or Myanmar, this policy might make sense.