This blog printed on 100% recycled electrons.
Last week the Madville Times directed the Karl E. Mundt Dakota Invitational, which required regular contact with oral interp coaches all around the state. E-mail is great for communicating with teachers: they are too busy helping kids and grading papers to drop everything the moment the phone rings (an ethos more people should observe with their cell phones). E-mail lets teachers handle questions and requests according to their own schedule.
Imagine my distress to discover a number of teachers were not receiving my e-mail updates on the tournament. I knew it couldn't be that they weren't checking their e-mail: with laptops in the classrooms and all the other technology we're spending our education dollars on, our teachers are more wired than the Borg. I checked my computer for operator error and found nothing amiss.
I thus called the friendly folks at the K-12 Data Center to see if they could help. Quicker than you can accidentally hit "Delete all files of any importance forever," the K-12 Data Center's Grant had an answer: I was blacklisted.
What? Blacklisted? Did I really make Governor Rounds that mad?
No, it wasn't the state directly, and it wasn't me*. It was the external filtering software that keeps people our teachers and students from accessing objectionable material. As I understand it, this commercial software constantly revises its list of objectionable web addresses and content and blocks it from the K-12 server. My signature file on my e-mails includes a list of my current associations, and that includes a link to the Madville Times. Evidently, the commercial software often blacklists Blogger/Blogspot sites. Not always -- that's the strange thing about the algorithms. Some teachers were receiving my e-mails just fine, but others had no clue I was trying to reach them.
Of course, given that the filters are external software operating on murky, secret formulas, the only thing the K-12 Data Center could recommend I do was delete my signature file and resend all the e-mails.
Unaccountable third-party software is thus protecting our teachers -- most of the time -- from the objectionable content of the Madville Times. Thank goodness: who wants teachers reading about social responsibility and better teacher pay? Such smut! Now back to the salt mines!
*A shout-out to the English teachers out there: "It wasn't I" is the proper grammatical form, although you'll never convince the kids of that!
Hide Fido (by Andy Horowitz)
-
I coined Noem as the ‘Palin of South Dakota’ when she ran for the state
house, seems I nailed it; America: meet your new Secretary of Homeland
Security. Sh...
3 hours ago
I think some of the school systems block all blogs. A local teacher said he could not view my blog. Some of the ISPs spam traps ban any email with "tiny url" links.
ReplyDeleteThese systems are far less than perfect and I assume some systems operators take the very easiest route possible and as a consequence toss more than a few babies out with the bathwater.
My employer utilizes one of these systems that's less than judicious with its filtering.
ReplyDeleteMy brother-in-law could explain more, as an engineer of such systems.
But as I understand it, some of these filters are very simplistic. Blogs are blacklisted.
At work, they don't want us doing online banking or gambling. Nor do they want us to waste bandwidth by streaming online radio. So they check a couple of overly simplistic boxes on the software, and voila, it's gone.
But stuff we need gets blacklisted too. It's terrible. Our local arena is co-located with a horse racing track. The track has legal gambling. So the arena site gets blocked.
They wanted to block blogs too, but we had to fight that, considering we blog at work. Sheesh.