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Dear Subscribers:

This week we begin a three-part series on a Southwestern US school district's Internet evolution - from filtering decisions to great things teachers are doing with the Net. For this week's issue, an overview from the district's technology director. Here's our complete lineup for this second week of February:

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One school district's Internet evolution

The Madison School District in Phoenix, Ariz., has seven elementary and middle schools and about 2,000 computers connected to the Internet. That's about seven connected computers in every classroom, says Bob Burwood, the district's director technology. You can imagine that Internet filtering became an issue fairly early in the district's online experience.

Bob's been there from the start. His district is also one of the early adopters of Dotsafe, Inc.'s free school-filtering service (please see our Dotsafe item under "Two upbeat kids' safety solutions"), and we were curious about what led up to their latest filtering decision and how it was going.

"We've felt the need for some kind of filtering system three years ago," Bob told us. "I looked around and, frankly, the cost of having district-wide filtering was prohibitive." He said that, at the high end, he was looking at around $1 per computer per month. That added up to tens of thousands of dollars a year.

"I don't have that budget on an annual basis," Bob told us. "Maybe we could've afforded a one-time cost of $20,000. So what we did was we used a Microsoft proxy server, which allowed us here at the district to decide which sites teachers and students could go to."

They created their own "white [as opposed to black] list" of sites students and teachers could go to, blocking access to any other sites on the Web. "We did that for about two years. Over time we came up with about 4,000 sites they could go to. Of course they were good, sound, educationally relevant sites. But as we went through this we realized, man, this is a lot of work to keep this up." Also, some were perishable - the information got old, the URL changed, the site went away - and "there was a lot of good educational material out there on the Web that we didn't know about or couldn't get to because it wasn't on our white list.

"So I started again looking at these filtering systems. I did find one that was about a 10th of the cost of the top-of-the-line one. It worked pretty well. They blocked sites, we could add to the blocked-sites list sites that we found that were objectionable, and there was an update we could download every week to keep the blocking list relevant and up to date. But it was still a couple thousand [dollars] a year."

When Dotsafe contacted him and told him filtering would be free, Bob took the offer. He told us the district also liked the free (and protected) email account for each student because some teachers were very keen about having their students participate in email mentoring programs and other educational connections with the "outside world" (for an example, see our story about 8th-grade science teacher Judy Whitcomb in Chicago). Bob did tell us they haven't quite implemented student email addresses yet.

So we asked him how the filtering service had gone so far. "It seems to be working pretty well. We've found a few inappropriate sites, and we've contacted Dotsafe about them. They've been responsive. We had an incident yesterday where a parent called me about a site her son came home with that she objected to. Dotsafe responded to my email about it within two hours, saying they'd look into it. They have a site review process they go through. We all look at the Internet with different eyes," he added.

We asked him if it bothered him that the system doesn't allow for customization (turning filtering on and off or changing filtering criteria) by individual teachers or administrators. He said, "We don't miss that feature [of some higher-end systems]. A basic factor is the extent to which our teachers use the Internet and to which they understand how to use it. We're kind of new at this."

The Madison district's staff development specialist, Jodie Neihardt, echoed that, saying that filtering has only just opened up the Internet for teachers there, now that so much more of it is available than even a 4,000-site white list would allow. "Filtering is a very positive development," she said.

But even with filtering teachers have to send home permission slips for Internet use. Parents have to give permission for three activities: Internet use in general, the posting of kids' pictures in a classroom site [no last names are ever allowed in Web pages], and whether or not a child's own work and first name can be included on a Web page. The only two reasons Jodie could think of why parents are not saying yes to these activities are: in the case of divorce, where part of a family is in hiding and a parent doesn't want a child identified with a particular school district, and parents - especially of the youngest students - not knowing enough about the Internet to sign anything.

Madison School District's curriculum-relevant links page is put together by some of its own teachers (they're paid extra to maintain and update the list).

If any of you educators out there would like to tell us about your school or district's own filtering decisionmaking process, we'd love to hear about it (and we imagine your peers would, too). Do email your stories via feedback@netfamilynews.org.

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New-media valentine for kids

YourOwnWorld.com (YOW, for short) has a valentine for kids this year: its launch! This service for the littlest new-media users (they're programming for children 2-12) comes out of the "beta" garage and steps into the children's marketplace on Valentine's Day. We've been keeping you posted on YOW's progress as we've seen demos of the service in development (see the most recent), so you might know we've liked what we've seen. It's a free, ad-supported, closed (therefore safe) e-playground with interactive games and other content supplied by YOW itself and partners such as The Learning Company (Reader Rabbit, Kid Pix), Hiyah.com (Kanga Roddy), Knowble.com, and - most recently - TIME (magazine) for Kids.

BTW, here's some interesting Net-use data on young children that YOW has gathered:

If this (young children not online) is either good news or bad news to your mind, we'd like to hear your thoughts either way.

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Web News Briefs

  1. The hack attacks

    Analysts are saying that the Internet's greatest strength - its openness and global accessibility - is its greatest weakness. Witness the week's "hacker attacks" that sabotaged a number of major commercial Web sites. Monday's attack - the first - shut down Yahoo! for three hours, denying millions of users access to email and the Yahoo! directory. Wired News quoted an expert calling the attack "an adolescent prank gone mainstream." Buy.com, CNN.com, eBay.com, and Amazon.com were attacked later in the week, ComputerWorld - not to mention online brokerage ETRADE.com. US Attorney General Janet Reno announced mid-week that the Justice Department was getting involved, reports the New York Times. And on Friday, President Clinton called a summit for early next week where government and Net community leaders can hammer out a counter-strategy, ABCNews reports.

    For the broader picture, the New York Times has an analysis, as well as plenty of breaking news on the subject. CNET takes a positive position on it all. Last but definitely not least, here's a thoughtful PCWeek column in Yahoo! that looks at the Net's evolution and how its increasing commercialization is requiring of us not just new laws and new security technology, but also a new social contract.

    Great fodder, here, for a school debate on how far hackers can go in demonstrating security flaws in Web sites. Clearly the White House, the Internet industry, and many other interests believe that - this week - hackers went too far. Is it possible that we've reached a crossroads, where hackers thinking they were involved in an "adolescent prank" will find themselves prosecuted as mature criminals? If you teachers out there do hold a debate on the subject, tell us what was learned!

  2. Digital divide: The people's view

    At least where the digital divide is concerned, Americans seem to want their government to take action. That's the message of a new study of the people's perspective on the gap between the haves and have-nots in computer- and Internet-literacy. According to the New York Times, 80% of Americans polled feel high schools should have computer-literacy programs. They say the federal government should require it, says one of the study's authors, a Rutgers University professor.

    Do you agree? Please give us your thoughts on high school and tech literacy.

  3. Buying a home on the Net

    People in the San Francisco Bay Area will soon be buying homes in online auction sites. According to ABCNews, although home sales are one of the biggest industries in the US, but relatively few consumers are buying homes online. Prudential California Realty apparently is thinking Web auction might be able to change all that. Twelve homes will go up for bidding on Yahoo!'s real estate page Feb. 20, with the auction ending March 6. ABCNews reports that buyers will be able to "place open bids on the homes, meaning that all buyers will know the current high bid. Unlike most auction sites such as eBay, the seller has no obligation to accept the highest offer, and buyers can add conditions to their offer, such as asking that the house be repainted…." CNET's version is "Home is where the Net is". As for the non-auction cyber-real estate experience, here's a story at BostonHerald.com, which says home buyers are using the Web mostly for info-gathering. Here's Wharton Business School's analysis of the business of home-buying on the Net (site requires registration).

  4. How 'bout a sofa?

    In "Would you buy a sofa on the Internet?" the Associated Press (via Compuserve) looks at e-commerce from the perspective of people who like to kick the tires and sink into sofas. The story includes links to several furniture e-tailers.

  5. Free PCs: Another way

    As you no doubt heard in those other (non-Net) media, there's a new way to get a free PC these days: Be among the 422,000 people who work for Ford Motor Company or Delta Airlines! According to the Seattle Times, the move is "as much a recognition of the value of computer literacy as it is an eye-catching perk." For Ford, the Seattle Times suggests, the move is about corporate-wide support for moving many business operations onto the Web. "To make such initiatives work, Ford wants to have workers who can imagine how the Internet changes the way the company conducts business, from ordering parts to checking quality control." Wired News quotes union officials speculating that, for Delta, it might be a way to ease all the current labor-organizing the airline faces. The airline denies that.

  6. Privacy fears fuel new business

    There's more and more software available that might be compared to a TV remote's "Mute" button. CNET reports that a whole passel of companies are now offering software that blocks advertising and prevents advertisers from gathering personal information through PC identifiers called "cookies." Internet advertising companies like DoubleClick can't be happy about this development. Meanwhile, there's also an effort in Washington to control cookies. USAToday reports that Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-NJ) said he'd introduce legislation that would prohibit Web sites from gathering information until users gave explicit approval. And the Associated Press reports (via the Boston Globe) that lawmakers in both the House and Senate are forming discussion groups to tackle online privacy's complexities. Do you think there should be laws to protect Net user privacy? Send us your thoughts.

  7. Australian Net-porn law loophole

    It had to happen. When the publishers of a sexually explicit Web site were ordered by the Australian government to shut the site down, they moved it to a server in the United States, reports Wired News. It's hard to imagine that the law's authors didn't see this coming.

  8. No political experience required

    It looks like one way to get into politics these days is to be a Webmaster. Wired News reports that presidential candidate John McCain, for one, employs a college sophomore and political science major to run his campaign Web site (in his spare time).

  9. New US user figures

    A just-released study by Harris Interactive found that half of US households now have PCs and 90% of them are now online. The news items can be found in CyberAtlas.

  10. More than 1 billion pages

    That's unique Web pages, say software company Inktomi and NEC Research. About 87% of those 1 billion pages are in English, 2.36% in French, 0.54% in Dutch. Their recent study also told them that there are nearly 5 million Web sites (see another figure we reported on last September in "How big is the Web?"); 751,974 links pointing to Yahoo.com; 261,472 links to MP3.com; and 3,959 links to Pokemon.com.

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Honoring the Civil Rights Movement

Our thanks to Homework Central and FamilyEducation.com for linking us to two fine, media-rich Web resources timed to Black History Month.

Homework Central's comprehensive page on the Modern Civil Rights Movement links you to sites organized by events, timelines, organizations, leaders, and updates of where the movement is today. And that's just one page of a whole section on the African-American Legacy.

FamilyEducation.com links to a feature in the Kodak site of photojournalist Charles Moore's profound images of the civil-rights struggle in the South in the 1960s - images that brought the struggle into homes all over the United States.

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A correction: AI filter availability

In our report last week on Exotrope's new artificial-intelligence-based Net filtering, we said the only way users could use the filtering system was through an affiliated Internet service provider. That was incorrect. The BAIR filtering system can be used by just about anyone who connects through any non-AOL ISP (the system doesn't work with AOL). Here is the download page.

People who use the service will simply be accessing the Net through two servers instead of one: their ISP's server and Exotrope's supercomputer, on which the AI software resides. We asked Exotrope if there would be any download-time delays, and they said delays wouldn't be significant - "from perhaps as much as five seconds to as little as a half-second more."

If you try the filter, please let us know what you think.

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That does it for this week. Have a great weekend!

Sincerely,

Net Family News


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