Hello. My name is Thom Gillespie. I write for a magazine

[Christopher Sawtell]

G.J.Tielemans at dinkel.utwente.nl wrote:
> A story:
> 
> Filters at home and at school?

Yes. Let me put you in the local picture a bit. Recently here in NZ 
there has been a fairly full on witch-hunt looking for people who abuse 
their Internet access at work, and a fair number of people have lost 
their jobs. In this context, which is rammed into the consciousness 
almost daily by the mass media, I think it's little wonder that an 
intelligent and sensitive lad feels that he would prefer not to have the 
worry of having pornographic images suddenly popping up on the screen 
when he is using the Internet. I think he must have either made a typing 
error or gone to an old site, which had been abandoned and replaced with 
an automatic forward. Anyway he found himself at a particularly 
revolting pornsite which used JavaScript to re-program the buttons so 
that it was impossible to either leave the site or to close the browser 
window. As a result I am putting SquidGuard on the cache. Don't worry, 
when he is older we will "open the floodgates".

I just wish that the porno broadcasters could be compelled to use a port 
number other than 80 while they are exercising their right to free-speech.


> When my daughters were little children, the played Prince of Persia on the
> computer: a labyrinth-game with boobytraps, like a Vietnam bamboo pitfall. 
> My wife did not like that, I argued that it would be better to sit next to
> them and comment on the games but at the end we banned this and other games.
> 
> Weeks later my wife and my eldest daughte did visit a shop and our little
> girl said to here mom: "Do not buy that game, thers is too much blood in
> it....
> 
> Then we went to the children movie Snowwith form Disney. In that movie the
> evil queen goes to the cellar and passes a cellar with a sceleton in it. You
> can see that the last act of that dead person was to reach to a bottle of
> water. The queen waks by and gives a kick to the head that roles away... My
> wife and I looked at each other and the next day Prince was allowed again.
> 
> Years later they played with their friends on the local network at home
> network-labyrinth games: but they do not fight each other but as a team the
> monsters in the caves. (Sometimes they killed by accident each other and
> then it became a moment tricky..)
> 
> Very young children you should protect for the ugly world. (...like you do
> for the televison programs they are looking at: Jerry Springer on children
> hours?)

> But I think that it is a better strategy to teach them the good and the bad
> side of the real world and learn them to develop their own opinion about
> that....

> Filtering the word sex also filters away good educational stories about the
> danger of Aids and how to prevent that. (I do not envy you when your
> children get the age of 15..) 



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Diego Gomez Deck [mailto:DiegoGomezDeck at ConsultAr.com]
> Sent: Friday, March 15, 2002 10:23 AM
> To: squeakland at squeakland.org
> Subject: Re: Hello. My name is Thom Gillespie. I write for a magazine
> 
> 
> Hello...
> 
> I'm not a teacher, but a father...
> 
> My son of 4 years old use the computer more time than I like... He learned
> to read/write with the computer at the age of 2 1/2... The problem I see
> today is the large ammount of information he can access, the information by
> itself (in large ammounts) is not so good... We need tools to clasify and
> process the information... I think that one of the goal for the next years
> is to "protect" childrens from the over-information (not too many years ago,
> when you searched for "holocaust" in internet you found more nazy pages than
> others)...
> 
> My 2 cents,
> 
> Diego Gomez Deck
> 
> 
>>Thom,
>>
>> You must not have kids of your own. Has literacy changed? No, but the
>>tools have. 6 years ago my son was in elementary school creating his
>>book reports on word processors, using electronic encyclopedia's and the
>>web as resources for research projects. What kids have learned is that
>>they can learn just about anything on their own! And to that degree, I
>>believe that to keep up with them, we need to consider instructional
>>methodologies that incorporate constructivist learning theory, case base
>>learning, the Internet and computing as much as possible. Even my son
>>"the artist" has moved to using tools such as Adobe Illustrator and
>>digital cameras. Educators need to continue to tap the natural interests
>>and instincts of the students. These kids are technology savvy far
>>beyond most of their instructors and parents. We need to teach
>>instructors and parents not to be intimidated by the technical
>>competence of these students. We should encourage them to become masters
>>of the information!
>>
>>--Barbara Jennings
>> Doctoral Student University of New Mexico
>> Organizational Learning and Instructional Technology Program
> 
> 
>