Denys writes:
>This is one of the reasons I am so against this great push
>to have all the schools in the country connected to the Internet. In order
>to pay for this, you will see your phone bill jump in January (in the US,
>of course.) I am against this because the Internet is a very powerful and
>even dangerous tool.
In some sense, this statement is redundant: all powerful tools are
dangerous. Moreover, the tools are there, and the best way to insure
safety is through education.
>My teenage daughter likes to surf the Internet at
>night. First place she usually visits is some chat room, where the
>wildest, sometimes nastiest conversations take place.
Your prerogative is to eliminate access to chat rooms. At the school
whose Internet services I administer, chat room filtering is done at the
router. There's also no Usenet access (in part because the school's 128KB
link doesn't have the bandwidth for a newsfeed). Most of the value on the
Internet lives on WWW servers and on computers accessible via telnet, and
all but four of the school's computers go through a proxy server for WWW
services. Filtering for some sites is done at the proxy server.
>I have had to drill
>into her that she is not to give ANY information of any kind about herself
>or any one in the family or anything.
How is this different from your non-Internet advice to her? The rules in
electronic interaction are no different from the rules in personal or
telephone interaction, at least for my kids.
>We also have the
>Britannica CD, which uses Netscape as the browser. I feel much happier
>when she uses the CD.
Obviously, we disagree on the value of the Internet. I prefer to educate
my kids to deal with what they'll find on some servers, and to understand
that when they're using the Internet, they're talking with real people,
not with computers. At the school, the kids have to have an Internet
permission slip signed by their parents. The permission slip states that
the school does a small amount of filtering, but that the filters aren't
and can't be perfect and that if they allow their child access to the
Internet, he/she is *likely* to see some sexually-explicit material at
some point. No parent has objected so far.
>I can just see the pedophiles and the crazies just waiting anxiously for
>all these youngsters to have unmoderated, unsupervised access to the
>Internet.
I think this threat is *way* overrated. The kids at school (K-8) don't
have email access, either: they don't need it, and it'd be a pain to
administer. So all they can do is FTP, telnet, gopher and the Web. That's
where 99% of the value is, anyway. I worry a lot more about real crazies
than virtual crazies.
But actually, I agree with Denys in one respect: the push to get Internet
access into every classroom *is* a waste of money. Unless schools are
willing to spend a LOT more money on staff development, most of the
benefits of Internet access will never be seen. The people who
participate in "Net Day" activities should be spending their time
training teachers, not running wires. As with most things technological,
the non-technical public has fallen head-over-heels in love with the
GEAR, and has completely forgotten about the PEOPLE who'll be using it.
Two minor points:
>I can also see having these millions of extra users downloading all sorts
>of stuff is not going to have a positive impact on the performance of the
>World Wide Wait.
The proxy server I installed at the school really helps in this regard.
It turns out that a lot of students access the same sets of pages (since
they're generally working on similar projects), so the proxy server cuts
down offsite web accesses by about 80%. I originally installed it because
the school had only a 14.4 connection to the Internet, but it's long
since proven its value, not only for performance but for logging and
filtering.
>The paradigm shift (I can't believe I
>said that), is going to occur when voice recognition hits its stride and
>computers understand what people are saying.
Voice recognition is the easy part. It's natural language recognition and
understanding that'll be the big prize, and nobody is very close to that
yet (limited-domain natural-lanaguage query systems notwithstanding).
Natural language understanding of Star Trek or 2001 caliber will be
required for most people to really make use of computers.
-- Bruce
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