As for the filter the library helps develop in students' heads: If properly developed, it can guide and empower them the rest of their lives. Its other pluses:
• Comes universally pre-installed, free of charge
• Has no socio-economic barriers to "adoption"
• Is automatically customized in micro detail *as* it's used
• Works at the "operating system" level
• Not only doesn't conflict with, but supports and *enhances*, all other "applications"
• Improves with use
• Is the No. 1 online-safety tool.
Critical thinking – about what one is posting, producing, and uploading as well as reading, consuming, and downloading – has never been more important for personal and academic success because of the flood of media flowing to and from the Internet's most active and social users, youth. But now – because media is also social, or behavioral – media literacy is also *protective*. If it teaches critical thinking about incoming social influencing (by friends, ex-friends, advertisers, predators – see this
So I hope schools are engaged in an important shift, not entirely away from tech filters, but at least toward understanding how vital librarians and other media-literacy teachers are to students' safe, constructive use of media and technology. [Besides, in many schools, tech filters are "knee-high fences" that only trip up adults at school (see this commentary in the Washington Post
As Joyce Kasman Valenza and Doug Johnson recently wrote in School Library Journal
[I guess I've been thinking about this so much lately because School Library Journal just published my view of "online safety 3.0" here
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