This Site is "Pornography?"

Part of me is laughing, part of me is steaming mad. I recently posted a call for educators in Second Life to visit ISTE Island there and vote for a blog to be featured at the Blogger's Hut, which I manage for ISTE. A fellow ISTE docent, Sabian Hawks, (Fil Santiago "irl"--"in real life) emailed me from his school in Los Angeles to inform me...well...let's let his email speak:

Scott,

I received your e-mail regarding the podcast voting and proceeded to click on your Web site. A strange thing happened: our filtration system blocked it and categorized it as ‘pornography’ - strange - thought you might want to check this out, as others may not be able to visit your site from work. (SL--Sabian Hawks)

Fil Santiago

My response to him:

Hey, Fil (SABE!),

I'm not surprised that you couldn't see my site. Sigh. many schools and content blockers disallow blogger and blogspot sites, since there is indeed some objectionable material there. I'm firmly in the camp of Wes Fryer about content filters. How are teachers to begin to learn to take advantage of the powerful networking tools of our age when they have their options limited by paranoid beaurocrats? I hope you'll take the time to visit the site from home if you can.

Thanks for the heads-up. Would you mind my quoting your message in a blog post?

Scott

Is there any hope for our public schools? I always prefer to hope, but I most seriously hope that our leaders pull their heads up out of their...addiction to 18th century learning models and open up things before it's too late. Clear expectations in the form of rigorously enforced Acceptable Use policies--for students AND faculty AND adminstration--are all that would be needed to step into the 21st century.

Check out Jamie McKenzie's take today on "Breaking the YouTube Blockade" to allow teachers to use some of the very valuable resources YouTube can provide.

Howard Rheingold's New Collaboration Message

I follow Howard Rheingold nearly every day, each time I get a minute to log into Twitter, the 140-character-per-message personal networking tool that lets us "follow" social and professional "tweets" to collaborate by means of those short messages, learning from one another and sometimes just trading jibes or comments. Howard, a busy man, doesn't follow me, so our relationship is not mutual, at least not yet, but I do get to check his ongoing thoughts whenever he gets his own minute to twitter. At present I have 75 followers--many of them very prominent technology thinkers and innovators--and I follow 46, so there's some of that non-reciprocal tweeting going on with me, too. I'm a busy man in my own small ways.

Occasionally I check my followers and add a few of them to my "following" list and thereby enrich the conversation (perhaps our boy Howard will do the same with my contributions one day). If someone's thoughts don't enrich, I simply stop following them. The result is a constant montage of thinking and human activity.

All this is a long way of saying that twitter itself is a clear example of what Rheingold's talking about in the talk hosted at TED Talks, another place I learn.

Everybody knows I am a Web 2.0 junkie. Howard's talk helps explain why. It's about cooperation. The new collaborative technologies, I believe, will enable an age of human development and cooperation that we are only just beginning to envision. I'll join in with @hrheingold to ask you to help get the "Cooperation Project" going. Watch: