I am not normally one to pay any attention to Channel 9's ACA program, but tonight's story on "Computer Game Outrage" drew my attention.
The basis of the report is that students at a school in northern Queensland have accessed an inappropriate game that involved the player moving around and shooting naked men, if you do not shoot them in time the player is then assaulted. The game is fairly graphic and not one that should be accessible by students.
However there are more issues in this story than just the sensationalism beaten up by ACA. The first issue centres around the idea of content filtering. Like many government and educational jurisdictions the Qld Education Department used software to block sites based on what are called white and black lists. This form of filtering is fairly arbitrary and tends to block a large number of sites that have educational benefit. Content filtering also provides a form of censored Internet experience for both teachers and students - which depending on your view is either a good thing or a bad thing.
I personally believe that what should occur in our schools and educational systems is that Internet access should be monitored rather than filtered, so as students and even teachers uses sites anything that appears to be inappropriate can be flagged and using log on details individuals can be made accountable for their actions and online behaviour. To enable this it means that appropriate log on services need to be established as well as systems that can flag search terms and sites easily and effectively, additional the school should have the capacity to block sites as appropriate rather than just have large blanket blocking procedures. In a school this means that the Internet is still the Internet and that students and teachers can access the vast majority of sites but with ongoing education of all about online responsibilities these issues can be avoided whilst ensuring that everyone is becoming responsible.
"Content filtering simply provides a false mechanism for teachers, schools and education systems to believe that students are being protected from inappropriate materials.
This belief leads to complacency and a lack of ongoing awareness about online responsibilities, a perfect breeding ground for incidents like this one to occur."
Another issues that is raised by this item is that in all Australian schools students should always been in view or close proximity of a teacher (duty of care), the question here is what skills or knowledge did the teachers at the school have in regards to online games and possible inappropriate content, what supervision was being provided, what task were the students involved in how and where were the PC located. These are all important questions that school need to consider, and with an aging teaching workforce with limited ICT skills and online knowledge, staff at the school may not have been provided with appropriate strategies and information around students online activities.
From this item there is also the issue of the schools response to the initial parent s report about the site - what would your school do? What should your school do? An interesting question, but given that this game had been around for a while in a school environment I am sure that many students would have known about the site - from first hand experience these types of things travel around the student population very quickly. The school should possibly have assessed the situation and depending on the level of knowledge in the school population either spoken to the classes involved or the school as a whole and talked about the Internet and that there were inappropriate resources and games out there but that as good online citizens these are not the things they should be playing or visiting. The schools should also have provided a note or details to parents, not just to communicate the issue but to ensure the parents are aware of access to the site on the home PC's where the majority of access would have occurred. This incident would also have provided a good point in time to conduct a parent information evening.
It is just not the school that needs to learn something from this, it is the parents as well - there were comment made that the game is "praying on little boys" how is this so? Girls play these games too and all children should be made aware of such sites. During the item parents spoke about their shock and horror but also that their "children are looking at child pornography" - not so, the game in itself is not child pornography, it is inappropriate YES but there are no pornographic images of children. In report like this the wrong statement presented creates a whole different spin for the viewers.
Finally there was one parent comment "once they have seen it there is nothing you can do about it." - again not true and this is the biggest and most irresponsible part of the report by ACA. These incidents provide an opportunity for schools, teachers and most importantly parents to discuss with their children about being responsible online citizens and being aware of what is appropriate material or not.
ACA could have provided some simple strategies for parents to discuss this type of issue, but like so many of their reports the over the top story is key not the ways to improve societies knowledge or capacity to deal with these situations.
Tags: Cybersafety online media Queensland schools education Australia
