Our daughter was rummaging through a box of memorabilia and found an evelope of photos taken in early 2001, about the time I'd purchased a cool new macro lens. One minute she was flipping through a series of cute puppy pictures and the next minute she's face to face with a set of full-frontal nude photographs depicting...a wolf spider. In fact, the spider was so exposed, the close-up so extreme, that Amy could not bring herself to even handle the photos so as to put them back into the envelope from which they came.
So when I got home I did the manly thing and, judging their scientific value to be near zero, tossed the spider pictures into the trash. When our daughter threw something away later that evening, and then needed to retrieve it, she shrieked again at the vile images that she could not unsee (and I was chastised for merely disposing of them instead of using our new commercial-grade shredder). Is there any possible way to prevent our children from accessing images or content that is disturbing to them or to us as parents? And should that be our sole criteria for judging whether or not we have won the war on porn?
A new Red Hat employee queried an internal e-mail list as to methods of protecting their children from accessing pornography, and through the responses I learned a few things I thought I'd share...
Perhaps the first question to answer is "what is to be protected?" We live in a media-saturated culture where some of the raciest material is to be found in all its pixelated glory of some of the most conservative TV programs (see Fox News Porn). Between the catalogs, newpaper ads, billboards, etc., there's plenty of disturbing material to go around. Indeed, when traveling through the airport with my daughter last year, she had quite a laugh when she came face-to-face with the image of a woman barely dressed on the cover of Cosmopolitan. (She called her "naked-bottom girl" for the rest of the day.) Deciding where to begin has become difficult indeed.
One popular approach is taken by OpenDNS. (Disclaimer: OpenDNS was funded by the former CEO of CNET.) The Domain Name Service (DNS) is the service that translates a URL (such as wikipedia.org) into an actual IP address (such as 208.80.152.2). By using OpenDNS instead of regular DNS, you give them permission to help you with the translation:
- wikipedia.org -> 208.80.152.2
- wikipedia.og -> 208.80.152.2 (it corrects your "spelling mistake")
- playboy.org -> BLOCKED! (if you want to filter out Web sites that serve "pornography" or "nudity")
But they also log every site you visit (part of the bargain of being between you and a "real" DNS server) and there is vigorous debate as to whether OpenDNS should be doing application-level rewrites of network-level requests. People think it is wrong (evil, even) that Google's toolbar does this. And they raised holy hell when VeriSign did this back in 2003. But if you are not bothered by the idea that whatever you type into your browser goes first to OpenDNS.com, and secondly, that when you request Site A, it could transparently and silently take you to Site B as if it were Site A, then it may be an interesting solution. As with any service that collects and interprets such sensitive personal information as your browsing habits, I suggest you read their privacy policy carefully. And you should be aware that OpenDNS is not open source.
If you want a content filtering solution that is open source (because you want to independently verify what is being logged, and you want to independently verify how the blocking choices are being made), you might be interested in DansGuardian. They have an impressive list of users as well as a blacklist you can review, adopt, or ignore. Several of my colleagues said that they use DansGuardian and that it works well.
An even more interesting suggestion was to use a firewall to force all Internet access through a proxy that can log every connection from every client computer. One family reported:
The proxy doesn't have a filter on it, but it does mail my wife and I a daily summary of what each computer asked for and when, so we know what the kids are doing online. And we make sure the kids know that we know.
I must admit that at first I was taken aback by the idea of having this type of access to somebody else's surfing history. But then I asked myself: if I am at all bothered by the idea of parents having such access to their children's surfing habits, how happy am I to be trusting that data with some third party, their supercomputer, and who knows what federal agencies?
Back to the topic of open source. One parent raised the issue that they are quite confident of the security and configuration of their own computer network, but what about the neighbor with the open wireless access point? A little education goes a long way. First, if you see a neighbor has an open wireless connection, suggest that they may wish to close it, as it represents a security problem for you. Second, if they are concerned about being a gateway to inappropriate content, suggest a mechanism whereby they, too, can play a role in filtering the content. OpenDNS might not be the right solution if your neighbor does not agree with their business model, but DansGuardian could be a good alternative. Third, use this as a positive opportunity to discuss with your children the "rules of the road" of Internet use. Those rules could range from accepting real-time oversight (how we do things at our house) to requesting specific permission to access the Internet (the parent turns on the sole wireless router the child's computer is configured to access) to accepting arbitrary monitoring and reporting. Or, do none of the above and study hard for what you plan to do when your child inevitably does access something you find disturbing and inappropriate, not to mention the disturbing and inappropriate things that porn-serving companies like to do to your computers. Worse than spiders, for sure.
Last year Amy put her PhD in neuroscience to good use when she wrote the article debunking Baby Einstein. I, too, aired my thoughts in an article titled buy now, pay forever: the business of tech toys. Today, a blog from open source community member Stormy Peters teaches that we may have it all wrong when it comes to rewards and motivation.
Adlerian psychology teaches that every human being has the goal of belonging, of making a place in his or her world. Discouraged children, who find themselves unable to accomplish this goal on the socially useful side of life through cooperation and contribution, may develop mistaken goals in their struggle to belong. But what is it that encourages or discourages a child? One theory is that praise, which represents a form of judgement, orders the child within an external locus of power, making them helpless or powerless when praise is witheld, whereas responses or natural consequences that relate to a self-centered view—doing things for their own sake— help the child develop an authentic and independent sense of self. What does this have to do with technology?
As I reported in our own family's on-going XO Laptop experiment, the rewards of learning can be both immediate and self-evident, if only the game is not too deeply buried under layers of flashy but meaningless praise. We are struggling against a consumeristic tide that bombards our daughter with unrealistic promises of happiness and prestige/social status, but we are also winning a few battles here and there as the intrinsic rewards of authentic accomplishment push aside the TV clutter for another day.
If the Adlerian hypothesis is correct, that children really want is to belong and to be significant, then how do external rewards help or hurt the child as they grow into adulthood? A dependence on external rewards for a sense of self leads to a profound feeling of emptiness, which is chronicled in the excellent book The Price Of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids. So without telling anybody how to be a better parent, let me just suggest that you look at social software and tech gadgets from a new perspective: what is the reward and who defines it? The more external and the more arbitrary the reward, the more the reward may diminish (to the point of extinction) intrinsic motivation. Conversely, the more ways a child can find some intrinsic reward in the activity (even if it's the reward of decorating rather than programming a laptop), the more the child builds an intrinsic sense of belonging and significance.
Happy Valentine's Day!
Ice storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, landslides, wildfires, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis are just some of the forces of nature that can wreak havoc on the lives of untold thousands in a period of seconds, minutes, days, or months. As global temperatures rise and as a growing human population expands into more and more areas less and less suited for either habitation or rescue, the average person in the world (one of 6+ billion) faces an increasing likelyhood that he or she will face a real disaster that seriously disrupts possible response.
Consider the plight of Sri Lanka, which was devastated by a tsunami in 2004. According to a BBC eyewitness reporter:
There are no kind of emergency services here, there are no helicopters thumping through the sky to come to save people. It is a do-it-yourself rescue.
The final tally reported more than 40,000 dead and a staggering 2.5 million displaced. And from the report's summary: "Waves as high as six meters had crashed into coastal villages, sweeping away people, cars, and even a train with 1,700 passengers." Whatever infrastructure may have existed prior to the tsunami, it was completely overwhelmed by both the magnitude of human need and the destructive power of the disaster. Within hours, open-source software developers created the Sahana project, and within days, their home-grown solution was doing more to help the Sri Lankan people than first-world conventional software packages did in far less extreme circumstances. And now it is doing even more, with the One Laptop Per Child hardware platform.
... Read moreOur family took a roadtrip from North Carolina to South Carolina in the past month. We all agreed that my daughter could not ask "Are we there yet?" more than five times, and we decided to bring along one of our XO laptops to give her a fighting chance. (We've never had an in-car video system.) After her first "Are we there yet?" question, we suggested she might want to boot up the XO, and she did.
... Read moreTwo weeks I wrote about how the XO laptop endowed a 9-year-old boy with seemingly magical powers (of intellectual curiosity and competence), and I wondered aloud whether my 8-year-old daughter would fare as well. On the one hand, she does like gadget gifts such as The Littlest Petshop. On the other hand, many such gadgets wind up as nothing more than a surface waiting to be decorated with stickers or glitter glue. Would her reaction to the XO validate or repudiate Negroponte's hypothesis that his project is an education project, not a laptop project? It seemed to work pretty well for Rufus.
We decided to open the laptops on Christmas Eve--the two I bought via the Give One Get One program, plus a third I bought from a co-worker who had Given One but did not want to Get One. Go figure. My first happy surprise was that the XO logo was different on all three. This made it possible to identify which was whose without stickers.
After booting them up, we all had to learn the Sugar interface. My second surprise was that it was not quite obvious to me how these XOs would network. Two of them were quite happy to mesh with one another. The third (which I'd opened earlier) was all happy about our Netgear wireless router and could not be bothered with the mesh network. How the heck was I going to get the two that were networked together to network to me?
I confess: I had to go to the Web to read some documentation about the theory and practice of the Sugar interface and network connectivity. This gave me my third (and happy) surprise: it was quite obvious once you grokked it, and it also meant that these laptops are not quite as promiscuous with their connectivity as first I had feared. I knew that the Sugar interface was based around activities, but I didn't understand until reading the documentation that the activity was the thing you shared, not a network connection or hardware resource. When my daughter started a chat, she could go to her neighborhood, and when mousing over her own chat application, she could decide to invite others she had marked as friends. With this two-level acceptance policy (first, she has to find and mark a friend; second, the only activities that are shared are the ones you choose to share with a friend), the XO is far less of a security risk than first I feared. Nevertheless, I wanted to really make sure I understood the features and the limits of XO networking so I hopped on #olpc-help and verified that my network bifurcation was a known limitation (possibly to be fixed with update.1 in mid-January).
But the real fun began after we started to explore the XO's games. I told her to open Pippy and we played the "guess the number" game. In Pippy, the source code appears on the top half of the screen, and the interaction window (where you enter your name and guess the number) appears on the bottom half. She played the game three times, averaging about 7 guesses per try, and then said "I want to play another game." I suggested she try playing a different game by modifying the parameters to guess a number between 1 and 1,000,000, instead of between 1 and 100. She looked at me with wide eyes. I explained that on the top was a program, the program of the game, and that if she changed a single number in two places, she could change the game itself. She went from a look of "no way" to a look of "OK! What are we waiting for!" in about 200 milliseconds. She started to enter a million, decided that was just a little too large, and changed it to 1,000. She hit "run" and sure enough, the prompt asked for a guess between 1 and 1,000. She looked at me excitedly. I told her to guess, and after 11 guesses, she got it. She looked at me again, somewhat amazed. I told her she had just programmed the computer. I might as well have told her we were going to spend a week in Cinderella's castle--she jumped up, shrieked, and yelled "HEY MOMMY! GUESS WHAT!? I JUST PROGRAMMED THE COMPUTER!"
Needless to say there was much excitement. She tried other modifications, including a version of the game she could win every time on the first try. She got her syntax errors, run-time errors, all the other scrapes and bruises one gets on the way to learning how to program, but she was excited, elated, and became confident! The little scorekeeper in me said:
Negraponte: 1, Doubt: 0.
I had to report this success to the #olpc-help newsgroup, which brought forth some cheers and hoopla. A person logged in as cjb asked "Are you the Michael Tiemann?" I explained that while there are a few, yes, I was the guy who wrote GNU C++. He responded that he was the author of Pippy—how cool is that? The author of the very program was reading the mailing list on Christmas Day!
So far, everything, and I mean everything about the XO has exceeded my expectations: the build quality, the software functionality, and most importantly, the positive effect it has had on my daughter's curiosity and confidence about computers. What a great gift!
One happy blogger
(Credit: Michael Tiemann)Santa's elves worked overtime to ensure that little green laptops would make it to homes across North America by December 24th. After reading of another's horror story (give one get none), and then after reading more and more reports of XO laptop deliveries elsewhere throughout my corner of cyberspace, I'd begun to wonder when my pair would come. Amy called me just before noon to let me know my shipment had come in...
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In the movie Hairspray (2007), Tracy Turnblad gets sent to detention for "inappropriate hair height". But instead of being a punishment, her pink slip is a ticket to a higher education than her school is willing or able to teach, and an opportunity to enjoy the greatest freedom of all--the freedom to be herself and to follow her dreams. The currency rebels of today have moved from hair height to copyright, and the hottest ticket to detention is...Firefox. !!!w00t!!! Consider this facsimile of a letter supposedly sent from the Principal's office of Big Spring High School in Newville PA: (UPDATED)
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On Thursday BBC News gave us a child's view of the $100 laptop. The article reads like a techie version of Jim Carrey's breakout movie The Mask, with Rufus Cellan-Jones as the star. The laptop, which came by way of Nigeria, unleashes incredible intuition and abilities in young Cellan-Jones:
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My First Computer, for ages 3 to 6
(Credit: LeapFrog)
The New York Times' Technology section leads with the story headlined "For Toddlers, Toy of Choice Is Tech Device," declaring:
Cellphones, laptops, digital cameras and MP3 music players are among the hottest gift items this year. For preschoolers.
On the plus side, retailers and toymakers have learned that children are not satisfied with fake gadgets. Hooray for authenticity!
On the minus side...
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Teachers have an unlimited supply of interesting ideas for classroom projects, but have often been limited to the resources they could afford to contribute from their own pocketbooks.
Seven years ago, a history teacher in the Bronx started a Web site that directly connected teachers and donors to fund classroom projects. This week DonorsChoose announced that its program has expanded to include every public school in America.
This "open source" approach to supporting public schools encourages teachers to be innovative and entrepreneurial. Their proposals compete in the marketplace of ideas to attract support. Everyday citizens are invited to become philanthropists who can make a big difference by pooling their contributions, from $10 on up.
As a donor, I found that my experience on DonorsChoose channels reminded me of the thrill of an eBay purchase. But instead of making an impulse buy for something that I didn't really need, I was making a contribution to a worthy cause. In return, my family has received wonderful thank-you packets from teachers and students that include letters and photos of the projects we funded.
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