The Travelin' Librarian

Most of my long-time readers will be familiar with my opinion of filters. Well, for the past two days I’ve been teaching workshops in a computer lab for a local school district. Being a school lab, I was subject to the district’s filtering system. Luckily, I was given the password to get around it, which worked most of the time, but the level of filtering astounded me. I was teaching blogging and RSS and Blogger was blocked. So was Flickr. (This made showing my blog interesting as the text would appear but the images, hosted on Flickr, would not be loaded.) Even my e-mail was blocked since lishost.org was considered a blockable “forum” which not even my use of the secret password would let me get through the filter. whatsmyipaddress.com was blocked, yet whatismyipaddress.com was not. (Go figure.) As one librarian said at lunch today, “let’s teach highway safety buy closing the highways”.