Don’t miss Larry Magid’s thoughtful piece today on CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/08/01/scitech/pcanswer/main1853357.shtml “House Misfires on Internet Safety.” Â
The article points out that, rather than serving to strengthen penalties on child molestors, the bill ”punishes the potential victims and educational institutions chartered to serve them, by denying access to interactive sites at school and libraries.”  Â
In addition, Magid regonizes the impossibility of seriously blocking access–”even if schools were to block such sites, it wouldn’t stop kids who were determined to get access.” He points to the incredible proliferation of social networking sites. (To say nothing of the proliferation of proxy servers!)
These two paragraphs are particularly quotable for school and library folks:
If children are going to get into trouble online, chances are it won’t be at school. They’ll be home, they’ll be at a friend’s house or they could even be completely away from adult supervision using their mobile phones. Schools and libraries are relatively protected environments where adults are never far away and, for the most part, computers are in public locations that make it difficult for users to hide what they’re doing.
If anything, schools and libraries should be encouraging kids to use blogging and social networking services. They have enormous educational potential for such things as writing, interviewing, collaborative research, media literacy, and photography, but even if not used as part of a formal supervised education program, they encourage kids to communicate and reach out to others.
And Magid concludes:
I’m glad Congress is concerned with Internet safety but rather than pass DOPA, it ought to be funding campaigns to educate children, parents, and teachers on how to use the Internet safely - while giving the cops and prosecutors the resources they need to truly delete online predators.
