Foolhardy Protective Measures

The idea of protecting students is honorable. The focus on keeping students safe online is admirable. Banning a tool, rather than teaching students to use it wisely, is foolhardy and does not educate or protect students. Thereby failing to accomplish the original goal.

Schools, businesses, and other such entities who own technology and let others use it can make rules on what to do on their systems (such as restricting employees from using the office computers to instant message or visit chat rooms). Furthermore, private schools can, and should, be allowed to set rules on how students are supposed to act outside of school. Private schools enter into contract with the student (actually the student's parent/legal guardian) stating that for so much money the student will be educated, and that both the school and the student will abide by certain guidlines. The school is justly able to set restrictions on in and out of school behavior.

My issue is not that the school shouldn't be able to make rules on out of school behavior, rather it is failing to educate the students. Students should be taught to exercise good protective measures when online. Don't give out information such as home address, telephone numbers, schedules, or any other personal information that would make the student vulnerable to identify theft, predators, and other dangers. The government refers to this as OPSEC. Teaching students to employ good OPSEC would be much better for the students long term.

Attempting to completely ban a technology (such as blogging) is fruitless. Especially when teenagers (among others) are embracing it at the current pace. Enforcing such a technology is also prohibitive. It is impossible to search the entire web (if you can figure out how to do it, you could put Google out of business) and extremely time consuming to constantly monitor students' actions outside of school. Moreover, proving that a particular has and maintains a blog or personal space site is a difficult burdon. If the school were to choose to follow with suspension for the violator, what if another student actually created the site and impersonated the supposed violator? Or how could the school prove that a claim from an actual violator of a third party impersonating the actual violator is false?

Blogging is not going away any more than email or telephone calls. Thinking that banning blogging is going to protect the students is just as foolish as thinking you can close your eyes and the bad guy along with his threat will disappear. Educate on the threats and how to mitigate them.