child protection + anti-cheating

Bryan Berry bryan.berry at gmail.com
Sun Jan 11 11:43:41 EST 2009 

cjb wrote:
> I hope you don't mind if I give some blunt/opinionated answers:
> 
>    > How do we protect children from accessing porn or other
>    > questionable content, and how do we prevent malicious persons from
>    > communicating with kids, like say, child predators in IRC?
> 
> You can't prevent this, if you also want to provide Internet access.

You definitely can w/ dansguardian can filter questionable content. It
can be quite effective. It does register a lot of false positives
unfortunately. Dansguardian is quite tunable. DG will still allow access
to most sites on the Internet. We use it in my office and it is quite
effective if sometimes annoying. 

There are probably ways u can block kids from accessing particular irc
svcs. It is interesting to me that on the #olenepal irc channel we have
to refrain from bad language and adult subjects because sometimes kids
from our schools come onto the channel. I really hope they are not
accessing the #molestme or #child_predators_here channels but I may have
to deal w/ this sooner rather than later.

>From a moral perspective, parents and schools have every right to screen
what content their 8 year-olds have access to. There is some highly,
highly toxic stuff on the Internet. We all like to talk about freedom
but would you let your 6 year old daughter walk around a strip club by
herself? probably not.


>    > Do we have mechanisms in place for those or best practices to
>    > address these concerns?
> 
> "dansguardian" and "squidguard" are free pieces of software that attempt
> to detect questionable content; they are often installed by schools.
> You could ask questions about these on the school server-devel list.
> 
>    > How do we prevent cheating between students?
> 
> You can't prevent this.

I am inclined to agree w/ cjb on this, at least in the short term. In
the long-term there could be a lot of different solutions

>    > Like instant messaging each other during quizzes?
> 
> The easiest way would be to have the teacher stand at the back of the
> class looking for anyone doing so.  If network access is not needed
> during the quiz, you could also tell the children to turn on "Extreme
> Power Management" in 8.2.0 (which turns off the wireless radio), and
> then the green wireless LED lights on the front of the XOs should
> remain visibly off for the duration of the quiz.
> 
> Hope this helps,
> 
> - Chris.
> -- 
> Chris Ball   <cjb at laptop.org>
> 
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 8
> Date: Sat, 10 Jan 2009 23:56:53 -0500
> From: "Martin Langhoff" <martin.langhoff at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: child protection + anti-cheating
> To: "Chris Ball" <cjb at laptop.org>
> Cc: devel at lists.laptop.org, Carlos Nazareno <object404 at gmail.com>
> Message-ID:
> 	<46a038f90901102056j1d907d3fi3979509b4efdd186 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> 
> On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 11:25 PM, Chris Ball <cjb at laptop.org> wrote:
> >   > How do we prevent cheating between students?
> >
> > You can't prevent this.
> 
> Exactly. I've been working with online tools for education for ~8
> years now, and it's interesting to note - paper+pen technology does
> not prevent cheating either.
> 
> A few times I've been confronted with "this cannot possibly be used in
> education until there is no way of cheating with it", ignoring that
> books, pen and paper are *great* for cheating. And also for smuggling
> questionable printed materials into school too -- books and folders
> can hide magazines with porn or political manifestos.
> 
> Ban paper, put anyone who owns a printer in jail :-)
> 
> cheers,
> 
> 
> 
> martin
> -- 
>  martin.langhoff at gmail.com
>  martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
>  - ask interesting questions
>  - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
>  - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff
> 
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 9
> Date: Sun, 11 Jan 2009 18:45:04 +0530
> From: "Arjun Sarwal" <arjun at laptop.org>
> Subject: Re: Cerebro v3.0: File sharing and buddy management made
> 	easy!
> To: "Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos" <ypodim at gmail.com>
> Cc: Sugar Devel <sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org>,
> 	viral at media.mit.edu,	OLPC Developer's List <devel at laptop.org>
> Message-ID:
> 	<dc942fa10901110515m42409c53sfc4eabc9f1378136 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> 
> (sugar changed to sugar-devel)
> 
> 2009/1/9 Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos <ypodim at gmail.com>:
> > Want to exchange files between your desktop and your XO laptop? It can't get
> > any easier!
> >
> > In the latest version of Cerebro (currently 3.0.3) you will find simplified
> > file sharing and buddy management. Just click on the buddy you want to send
> > a file to and select a file to send! Screenshots are here:
> > http://cerebro.mit.edu/index.php/Documentation#Example_GUI
> >
> > If you are a developer, there is detailed tutorial to do file sharing from
> > Python prompt (!) here:
> > http://cerebro.mit.edu/index.php/Documentation#Buddy_management
> >
> > Enjoy
> > Pol
> >
> 
> This is really fantastic! :-)
> 
> Has anybody gotten the GUI to run...I get an error when I try to run the GUI.
> Anybody who has tried the GUI, please share your steps and results.
> 
> thanks!
> Arjun
> 
> >
> > --
> > Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos
> > Graduate student
> > Viral Communications
> > MIT Media Lab
> > Tel: +1 (617) 459-6058
> > http://www.mit.edu/~ypod/
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Devel mailing list
> > Devel at lists.laptop.org
> > http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
> >
> >
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Arjun Sarwal
> 
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 10
> Date: Sun, 11 Jan 2009 14:56:52 +0100
> From: Carl-Daniel Hailfinger <c-d.hailfinger.devel.2006 at gmx.net>
> Subject: Re: child protection + anti-cheating
> To: Chris Ball <cjb at laptop.org>
> Cc: devel at lists.laptop.org, Carlos Nazareno <object404 at gmail.com>
> Message-ID: <4969FAA4.4000200 at gmx.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> 
> Hi Carlos,
> 
> On 11.01.2009 05:25, Chris Ball wrote:
> >    > How do we protect children from accessing porn or other
> >    > questionable content, and how do we prevent malicious persons from
> >    > communicating with kids, like say, child predators in IRC?
> >
> > You can't prevent this, if you also want to provide Internet access.
> >   
> 
> Absolutely agreed.
> 
> By the way, a recent sociological study found out that children with
> access to unmonitored internet chat are less is danger of becoming
> victims of child predators.
> Although that sounds strange at first, it it obvious once you consider
> the fear of real-world child predators that someone might become aware
> of what they do. The "risk" that children tell their online friends
> about such predatory behaviour works as a pretty effective deterrent for
> real-world predators (which are a much bigger group than online predators).
> I can try to dig up that study if you need it for communication with
> officials.
> 
> 
> >    > How do we prevent cheating between students?
> >
> > You can't prevent this.
> >
> >    > Like instant messaging each other during quizzes?
> >
> > The easiest way would be to have the teacher stand at the back of the
> > class looking for anyone doing so.  If network access is not needed
> > during the quiz, you could also [...] turns off the wireless radio
> >   
> 
> That would work, but kids are smart enough to turn wireless back on and
> make the LED light ineffective (with paint/mud). And even if you can
> prevent that, the kids can use the camera to look back over their
> shoulder and check whether someone is watching them and cheat by
> conventional means.
> 
> Besides that, there's always the possibility of storing a cheat sheet on
> the laptop itself. Good luck trying to find that. A solution for that is
> to unpredictably exchange laptops between kids directly before a test,
> but it runs against the ownership paradigm.
> 
> Someone with enough time and/or money can always cheat. In many
> countries, kids have some free time and learning to cheat is probably
> the topic with the strongest motivation.
> 
> You can't prevent cheating, but you can make it difficult enough that
> most kids won't bother.
> 
> 
> Regards,
> Carl-Daniel
> 
-- 
Bryan W. Berry
Technology Director
OLE Nepal, http://www.olenepal.org

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