Filtering
1 10 2006One of the many discussions from the recent Teachmeet in Glasgow was the topic of filtering. Many of the web2.0 applications that we were talking about are being blocked by isp’s or LA, what can we do to get around this? In Shropshire I have to email our corporate IT team, who are in charge of our broadband connectivity, and ask them to get our ISP to unblock it. Most web2.0 technologies appear to be blocked, but the reasons they blocked are very bizarre, I noticed last week that Google Spreadsheets was blocked - the category it was blocked under was ‘chat’, I suppose I could use this real time collaborative spreadsheet as a chat room, but could I really be bothered? I think most technologies they don’t understand they just block and class it as chat. Tedtalks was also blocked as it has ‘talks’ in its url, I don’t think they check the websites when they block them if they did I don’t think they would have blocked it.
I mentioned that Becta had an article about Flickr that I used to persuade IT services to unblock Flickr, you can view it here.
Local authorities need to stop being so worried about locking everything down and start beginning to be a bit more grown up. It’s not an easy task but it is woth working at building that relationship with your IT folk so that they begin to see that you don’t have horns and that you actually have good educational reasons for what you want to do.