The Radical Voice

There has been a rather nicely radical little meme popping up in different places over the past couple of days that affects you. It started with reports that schools were blocking not only MySpace itself, but any website that mentioned the word MySpace. As Andy Carvin put it, it seems this is the new m-word, so horrible that merely reading it will corrupt an innocent child. He crossposted some of his thoughts to LM_NET, a school library mailing list, which resulted in some comments that it didn’t really matter if Andy used the m-word or not as in many schools ALL blogs are blocked anyway.

I wish we could have access to any blog sites…every one I try to access at school is blocked by our filter, citing web page hosting as the reason, among other things. You mention professional discourse… what’s that? (quote from Lisa)

The answer has been an uprising of feedback from various parts of the net. Miguel Guhlin has a nice response to a post by Tom Hoffman. Bud the Teacher also weighed in.

Andy Carvin and I had a nice offline discussion from my pointing out that the organization for which I work uses a filter that blocks http://andycarvin.com. So how then can I share his excellent ideas with staff and students without violating the organization’s AUP? Well, it is difficult, and there are a number of problems:

1. I cannot advise you to violate your AUP. That would be an insubordinate act and could result in disciplinary actions up to and including termination of employment.
2. At the same time, the Library Bill of Rights says that “III. Libraries should challenge censorship in the fulfillment of their responsibility to provide information and enlightenment.”
3. At the end of the day, you simply cannot block access to digital information. China has had better success than most, but then they don’t shy away from execution. School districts, without that last resort available to them, are going to have a much harder time.

So, what can you do? I will fully encourage you to access and share as much information as possible and share it as widely as possible:

• Print out critical blog posts from educational blogs to share with your colleagues and administration. Especially share posts from bloggers who are in the mainstream educational journals. For example, “Here are some additional thoughts from that Will Richardson guy who had that article in Educational Leadership…” Just happen to drop that you printed this at home because, sadly, Will’s blog is blocked here at school.
• Think about RSS. You can receive RSS feeds from sites via an aggregator or even e-mail. There are some great sources out there such as http://libraryblogs.suprglu.com and http://schoolblogs.suprglu.com. There is also another site that has been set up recently at http://www.kickrss.com/edtech. My interpretation is that it isn’t necessarily the content being denied by the AUP and the filters, but rather the context. We can work to change the context by distributing content therefore accessing content without bypassing the filter’s restriction on the context. (Your thoughts may vary, this is a personal choice.)
• Question filters and submit filtering reviews. Point out the credentials and worthiness of professional bloggers and ask to have their work reviewed for use as a professional development resource. Doug Johnson has had some great comments about this.

I want to conclude by saying that this is one of the basic ideas of Infomancy, and something I feel very strongly about. This is about librarians and other information professionals acting as guides to bring conversations to those who cannot access them on their own. We have to continue to have a voice and be the voice for others whose voice is blocked. We have to search for new solutions when the old ways are not working. I hope to work with others like Andy Carvin to create information repositories that can help spread the message. Having said that, I will also say that some things may be done anonymously and without description here. I know that this is a blog which represents my professional voice and thus cannot be fully separated from my professional self which reflects upon the organization where I work.

Posted in guide, infomancy, search, voice | 6 Comments »