Sadly, many educators are so tied up in school starting that their voices are largely being unheard in Congress. We are about to end up with a mess on our hands that no one sees coming. Do you realize that Blog her will be blocked from library and school access?

Sign the SAVE YOUR SPACE petition opposing HR5319.

Although HR5319 is titled the “Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA)�, the bill is very misleading. If you take a closer look at DOPA, you’ll find that this legislation actually limits your rights to access and express yourself on the Internet instead of “deleting online predators�. But before this legislation becomes law, there are several more steps including getting approval by the Senate and, ultimately, being signed by President George W. Bush.

Unfortunately, the public only sees what the media and politicians tell them. They need to hear from the actual users of social networking sites.

The SAVE YOUR SPACE petition is your chance to be heard and to show the public, the media and the U.S. government the importance and amazing power of social networking sites.

Help us get 1,000,000 signatures in 1 month.

Visit www.saveyourspace.org for details.

Save Your Space

Thanks for your comments. I signed the petition.

Marianne

Marianne Richmond
resonancepartnership

Marianne Richmond, I respect your opinion. You certainly have a right to your opinion as I have a right to my opinion. I’m not here to debate that issue or change your opinion.

I was surprised and disappointed that the vote was 410-15. Many of those who oppose DOPA do so because they believe that children should be educated and not restricted. I agree that they should be educated, but let us face it, not all parents do their job and the parents who are doing their job are left with schools and libraries that are not doing their job.

As parents we put trust in a school system that fails our children. Teachers are given one of the greatest responsibilities we can give to another person, that is educating our children and supervising them when we as parents cannot be there to supervise them.

Schools have an obligation to ensure that students have a safe environment and that should include a safe online envirement too. Teachers who fail to fulfill the obligation to supervise our children are failing the child. Computer networks have been established for learning in the school not for students to talk to their friends on MySpace.

Should children really be using these websites in Class unsupervised? I’m all for education and I believe that computers play an important role in their education.

We need technology in every classroom and in every student and teacher’s hand, but what we don’t need is children accessing the net with no supervision at all. How many children under 14 have already violated the MySpace terms of service?

Children should not have unsupervised access to the internet. There are just too many opportunities for inappropriate interactions. MySpace does not belong in the classroom. Again that is just my opinion.

I can not speak on behalf of the US, but I know that surprisingly some Canadian public libraries and schools do not monitor children’s internet access nor do they have filters in place. We were all teens once. I keep hearing the same comments. “Parents do your job.� Well I ask you this, “How many of you rebelled against your parents?�

No matter how much we take care of our children and educate them, it only takes them making one unhealthy choice to put them at risk. You can educate your child untill you are all blue in the face. The truth is that children don’t often think of the consequences of unhealthy choices.

I do want to add that while I support the bill, I do think that the legislation should be rewritten so it does not block sites such as Yahoo and Google etc. I think they need to better determine what sites will be blocked before passing the law. The bill was not very well thought out!

The internet has an amazing capacity to bring out the very best and the very worst of the world that we live in. While I participate in things online, I see nothing wrong with limiting access to children in school, libraries, or in the home. The fact is that even responsible parents cannot prevent their children from accessing material that is inappropriate. Every parent should remember their own childhood and the secrets they kept from their parents. Some of those secrets may have been very mild or outrageous depending on each person's childhood.

It only takes 5 minutes of unsupervised time for a 9 year old to stumble upon pornography online. Plus, let's not forget that children think that merely whispering words like "sex", "penis", "breast" is exciting and dangerous. Do we really expect them not to take 5 seconds to type that into a search engine and see what happens?

I am a responsible parent; I am an open parent; and I am a very honest parent. I answer all of my children's questions truthfully and in a manner appropriate to their age. However, my children will never have a computer in their rooms. Internet access will only be available on the computer in our home that is in an area viewable at any point.

Children are curious and don't always have good judgement. That is why we call them "children." So many of these young teens that are taken advantage of by predators online are lacking in discernment simply because they are teenagers. They haven't yet had enough experiences to recognize dangerous situations or the red flags that should be alerting them to the precariousness of their situation.

I am not against free speech, but since when is it a constitutional right for me to have internet access? For a long time we didn't have it because it was a luxury. Life still managed to continue. Other than not being able to look up directions quickly, little else changed

Terri

What to think of what I just read, in your post, as well as on the Cool Cat teacher blog?

My thoughts are forming in cloud like shape as I type, more ethereal than substantive, yet strangely feeling like there is an opinion in there.

Guess the place to start is with parameters... parent of a 22 year old living her own life unencumbered by parents, and a 14 year old who is. A blogger, liberal.

Name a right. Any right. Freedom of speech? Choice? Gun ownership? Every right we can name can also be found to have countless abuses of that right. It's a fact of human existence... we push on barriers, and sometimes we get by them.

I handled an unemployment case this week wherein the claimant had been discharged for not getting along with the family she worked for; it was their right, no quarrel with the dismissal. However, the reason given me was rather interesting... the parents would not allow their children to play on any playground equipment, to even go for walks, to be involved in any activity - they considered them too dangerous.

We all look to protect our children, and we worry over whether we do enough to keep them safe. My youngun is diabetic; we made a choice early on, and she was diagnosed at 27 months, to give her quality of life. We could be so strict in blood glucose monitoring as to preclude having any sort of normal childhood, or we could take a more moderate approach and let her be a kid, albeit one learning to properly manage glucose levels.

It would seem moderation is what's needed here as well. The easy way always seems to be bans, to shelter, to keep from... but when a young person hits 18, suddenly they face a world where there is pornography, there are predators, there are people preying upon them for every reason imaginable.

My college days began in 1972 at age 17. Previously I lived a very limited existence in terms of the greater world. Woefully ignorant of even the inner workings of my own mind and body, I probably went there with an effective maturity of an average 14 year old on some levels. It was learn on the fly, from peers, from professors. There was a steep learning curve in life.

There seems to be this need of preclusion. We teach abstinence only, eschewing a more comprehensive approach, in hopes those dastardly inner urges will just evaporate into the atmosphere. All well and good, if one likes their head firmly planted in sand.

Our young need information. They need to learn how to manage the information. To make good choices, to learn as we all do, from mistake, trial and error. We need to balance protection with the need to develop life skills.

And guess that is where my ethereal cloud leads me... to a more comprehensive need to address what we wish to keep our children from, and where in bloody hell they will learn the skills they need to make wise choices when the protection of parents and community are no longer there.

nelle

So much of the discussion of DOPA appears, to an outsider, to be about defining access or not (in schools and libraries), as if barring access creates a “safe� environment, or perpetrating the impression that it is highly irresponsible or dangerous to allow an older child or teenager any unmonitored time in the Internet… in other words, concentrating on the dangers and not on the advantages, which, in this case, is the opportunity to encourage your children to create content for educational sites or school projects using this media.

The media and politicians failed to realise that the vast majority of students using the blogsphere or communication platforms for educational projects are using this media to create highly innovative, constructive and educational content. The students learn to communicate their knowledge and learning experiences in a form that promotes discussion and presentation to a larger audience. This fact alone should please parents and educators alike; for this ultimately leads to responsibility and accountability. If a student has to present their knowledge to a wider audience, something that doesn't happen with more traditional methods of instruction, then the students invest more care and attention to their work.

I think that the backlash of passing the DOPA bill will not be a safer environment for the students to learn in, but a strangulation of innovative, communicative, and collaborative school-related projects. In the end, parents and educators have done the older children and teenagers a disservice and shown them that the adult world is more influenced by fear than reason.

lia from luebeck, germany

(author of the media safe 101 page on the Red Tent Blog)

Sorry, I forgot to mention a very excellent educational blog, weblogg-ed. Will has inspired me to question my opinions about education, define my goals about the type of education I would like my children to have, and step up to the plate on leading my children by example when it comes acquiring media literacy.

lia from luebeck, germany

(author of the media safe 101 page on the Red Tent Blog)

FYI - Xfire is not an online game. It is a free tool that automatically keeps track of when and where gamers are playing PC games online and lets their friends join them easily. It essentially works like yahoo or MSN messenger and allows you to chat and keep in contact with your friends who are online.

I can't seem to think of anything bad about having your children using this software... I can think of way worse things for them to be doing then trying to figure out which game server their friend is playing on so they can join them for some online fun.

- FiveO

That I agree more with Nelle than with some others. If we constantly stive to limit exposure to things we deem dangerous to our children, then how are they going to learn to handle dangerous situations? From what we say? From what we do? From books? All very valuable and useful sources for people who have learned how to learn. However I always find myself saying in those situations, "this is how it's supposed to work ...".

My experience (both as a person, a former teacher and a fledgeling parent) is that the most effective way, the best way to make the lesson "stick", is for them to do it themselves and (perhaps) make a mistake. I think our job is to love them, keep them as safe as is practical and to prepare them to be functional, useful, contributing members of society. Hiding (them) from All That Is Evil won't really do any of those very well I think.

And to expect that Congress produces anything actually effective or useful (as something other than fertilizer) ...?

Jim Heivilin

I wish we could have mobilized some on this issue at BlogHer but the timing was wrong.

Here's the link to the Anti-DOPA wiki (which needs updating, which I don't have time to do right now)

http://dopa.pbwiki.com/

Liz Ditz
I Speak of Dreams
lizditz@gmail.com