I wish to lodge a complaint on the efficiency of the DET Portal's whitelisting filter system.
The filtration is aggressive and deters many students from completing their school work.
The system simply isn't effective; I understand the need for a filtration system to protect students, but why go so far as to implement a whitelist?
The whitelist only allows websites approved by the DET; in theory this is a good thing but it does not work as very few sites are allowed - they are added at a slow rate to the list. Often a student requires information from websites which are not yet on the whitelist, yet they will not add it to the whitelist as the process will take weeks, and by then their assignment or work will have already been long overdue. And often the websites that they require are not worth the effort of submitting it to the whitelist anyway; it may only contain a small amount of information, and it may not even be approved if it is a "personal website" which contains some useful information.
The internet is a medium through which information is rapidly updated and changed - but the whitelist system changes this; new information will take weeks to process, by then it may already be irrelevant.
At our school, students are rarely able to complete their internet research at school - most sites are blocked (including relevant and educational sites) so they end up wasting time and completing it at home instead. Sometimes a teacher will plan a lesson which will involve several useful websites - most of which will be blocked and the lesson ends up failing - by the time all of the websites are approved, we will have already finished the topic, so what is the point?
Even the blacklist is quite inefficient (the whitelist takes it too far). For work related to computing studies, help for it is difficult as many sites are blocked as they are "personal sites", "bulletin/forum sites" or "IT sites". There is no point in spending millions of dollars of taxpayer's money on an internet service with an agressive filtering system (again paid by taxpayers) which deter students from completing work and learning. Even websites related to biology are blocked, simply because they contain keywords such as "sexual reproduction".
Not only does the system deter student (and teacher) research, it also slows down the connection to the internet considerably. Often the connection is down and when it is not it is extremely slow and makes it difficult to complete work.
The current system is extremely inefficient and it is a deterrent to students learning. It only disadvantages students who actually use the DET provided internet to learn; students with the intent of accessing inappropriate resources will continue to do so anyway. In fact, it is known that some diligent students have asked these students about filter circumvention methods so they can actually complete their work. I am strongly against any system that forces diligent students to resort to such measures.
I know parents want their children to be safe - but the parents who want more aggressive filtering often do not understand how these filters work and what they will do. An aggressive whitelist will indeed block most inappropriate material; but is it necessary? It deters students from learning. And students with the intent of accessing inappropriate content will do so anyway, despite any measures put in place to prevent them from doing so. These students are a minority, but the majority who have the intent of learning are affected. And as for risks of kidnapping and paedophilia, I think that parents talking to their children on these issues are far more effective than an aggressive whitelist which blocks almost everything. In fact, children are still exposed to risks out of school - any amount of filtering whether at home or at school does not efficiently prevent this. There are many forms of communication that criminals can use - children should be informed of risks instead of having filters which will essentially block everything but leave the children oblivious. This is not preparation for the "real world".
I propose that the system is improved by reverting it back to a blacklist - there are already many efficient blacklists available that do not block websites purely on a basis of keywords. Another solution would be not to have filtering at
DET level, but instead let individual schools decide which filtering level is best for them - this allows for primary schools, secondary schools and TAFE colleges to all have specialised filtering based on individual needs. This would be advantageous as it allows for schools to change filtering on a needs basis - for example for law classes which require content on cases involving rape or murder and IT classes which require IT content. Individual filtering would also be possible so that students found deliberately accessing inappropriate material can have privileges stripped.
As a student and a future taxpayer, I strongly recommend that the current DET filtering system is scrapped in favour of something more efficient that will allow all students to learn using maximised resources.
Here goes....*rant*
