Internet Management - Monitoring and Filtering

I missed the Jimmy Wales talk this week, although I feel that from the blog entries since (and talking to people) I have a good understanding of what transpired.
I was reading Graham Wegner's post on Barriers to Knowledge Sharing that led me to John Travers' article. I left the following response, but felt that it deserved to be reposted on my site.

here tis...

The management of Internet within schools comes down to two basic principles;

1. monitoring
2. filtering

Both of these have their merits and problems. It seems in South Australia we have a very heavy filtering aspect to our management process.

Monitoring of students would require evaluating sites accessed regularly and managing the results of these searches.

The monitoring tools exist, (although some would suggest they are broken) however it has been left up to individual sites to manage this with little direction.

As such the department can not rely on schools enforcing this and they appear to have relied heavily on filtering as they can manage this centrally.

This solution is cheap and easy, but realistically does not consider the needs of the learner.

One figure I heard was that 40% of websites are blocked by DECS. Even a very active person unblocking web 2.0 tools and other such services is going to be kept rather busy.

If Jimmy Wales is talking accountability, surely monitoring would take up a larger component of schools management of Internet access?

How would this be achieved? Education, after all we are schools. We need to educate the Principals, Governing council's and teachers to make this happen.

Individual schools need to be resourced to monitor students Internet use and this needs to ACTIVELY happen (Including personnel, equipment and training).

Consequence's (for lack of a better word) need to be forth coming for those breeching acceptable use and educating with counseling needs to occur to educate those students to how to use the Internet appropriately.

I am not saying do not filter. I am saying reduce the filtering and make better use of monitoring.

If we stick with the status quo then we are hampering students learning. As you have pointed out some schools are active is unblocking sites for students to use. Others are not. These students in these schools are getting a second grade education due to a scenario that was more than likely implemented as a cost cutting exercise.

Just my two cents...