My State Government has banned YouTube in schools March 1, 2007
Posted by Joseph Papaleo in General, Mobile Phones, Screencast.trackback
The Victorian State Government today announced that YouTube would be blocked in State Government schools. Why? (Read an article here or here)
Maybe there were too many students using it in class to look at innapropriate material instead of focussing on their work? Good guess, but no. Maybe because the extra bandwidth was too costly for the Government and they were trying to cut costs. Another reasonable assumption, but wrong again!
The reason is cyberbullying. Late last year, a group of teenage boys filmed themselves while assaulting a young girl and then making DVDs. The DVDs were distributed in the local area and it was then uploaded onto YouTube. Once this story got into the media, there were many commentators calling for the banning of YouTube in schools (as well as other technological tools).
While I am appalled at the actions of this group of boys and other cyberbullies, there is no way in the world blocking YouTube in schools will stop cyberbullying. While students are at school, bullying will continue to exist in school yards and classrooms, with and without the use of technology.
Naturally, other independent schools will follow suit (if they haven’t done so already) and block YouTube. What concerns me is that YouTube can, be a useful tool. I am currently playing with vodcasts for use by my Year 12 Further Maths class. I have started creating short videos on how they should be using their graphics calculator to solve various problems. YouTube (or podomatic or mogopop or other similar services) would have been an ideal way to distribute these helpful vodcasts. I also plan to use some YouTube videos I’ve found as part of some of my class projects (I’ll post an entry about these one day soon). But now with this ban, many schools will not be able to find crative ways to use YouTube.
So I now have to ask. How will my State Government stop students using YouTube out of school hours? Will they get ISPs to blacklist YouTube? Will they also ban all mobile phones at school and at home to prevent those nasty SMS bully tactics? Maybe they’ll even ask Telstra to close down its phone lines between 8:00 and 10:pm every day to prevent a student bullying another student by phone.
Sorry Steve Bracks (Victorian Premier) and Jacinta Allan (Education minister). You have got this one wrong!
BTW, YouTube removed the video from their site within a very short time, but there would still be many copies of that DVD circulating about. Maybe we should destroy all DVD players too!
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Well done, Joseph – a brave argument, and I agree with it.
I am currently experiencing a different kind of ban – no web-based emails in my dual-sector University – or, at least, not in my area. That means no g-mail – and no Blogger. And, while I’m not pretending that Blogger is the only way to blog, I quite like it – and I like its simplicity – that’s why I’ve been using it wih my classes for 5 years!
Of course, I can continue using it – but I am unable to sit beside the student who is having problems logging on, or who wants to do something more ambitious and needs support, or the ESL student who depends on my encouragement to write more, or the student returning to study who has little confidence in her computer skills. It is, basically, the end of the very successful ‘blended learning’ that has always taken place in my classes – and this approach is one which I am currently researching as part od my PhD.
And why has it been banned? The only answer I have managed to obtain is that web-based emails are an uncontrollable source of viruses…
Really???