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I recently posted a tweet about my work with K12 school districts regarding web content filtering issues with YouTube and was very happy to receive a couple of DMs from Angela Maiers and Elizabeth Holmes, two education professionals who I consider to be leaders in knowledge sharing and teaching experiences they share on Twitter.
–Follow Angela here and follow Elizabeth here — you will learn much about education from both of them.
Apologies up front for this long post. Sincerely hope by sharing my experiences more teachers, administrators, curriculum developers, technology coordinators and even parents will have a better understanding how filtering ultimately affects students.
Disclaimer
1. This post will not address content found on YouTube. This post will speak to the technologies behind filtering and how solutions from 3rd party vendors permit access to rich media content websites including YouTube. School Districts, based upon an established technology policy have options when choosing their web filtering solution.
2. Michael Wesch was a keynote speaker at WiscNet’s 2007 Future Technologies Conference …and just off the enormous success of his own video on YouTube. His presentation “Human Futures for Technology and Education” resulted in many attendees sharing his video at their schools helping fellow teachers and administrators better understand how students use the internet.
3. This post does not endorse any specific vendor.
4. This post draws upon my work with K12 technology coordinators, teachers and administrators along with vendor technical support and the excellent network support group at WiscNet.
5. This post addresses in a roundabout way the need for every district to have an established technology policy regarding filtering. Finally this post will address the critical issue of bandwidth necessary to deliver rich media content into the school.
Wish this was an easy, short post. The filtering process can become complex and frustrating. I have learned this isolates teachers who want to share compelling content with their students. This started as an answer to questions regarding filtering in K12 outside the 140 limit of Twitter and then kinda steamrolled…
Overview
K12 school districts are required by law to implement filtering to block adult, illegal or offensive content from minors. The law is known as the Children’s Internet Protection Act:
The 2001 Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) is a federal law enacted by Congress to address concerns about access to offensive content over the internet on school and library computers. CIPA imposes certain types of requirements on any school or library that receives funding for Internet access or internal connections from the E-rate program – a program that makes certain communications technology more affordable for eligible schools and libraries.
Computing vendors sell dedicated hardware, software and appliances (devices that combine filtering along with firewall, anti-spam and even anti-virus protection) that address CIPA requirements for a K12 school district or Library. Their solutions integrate CIPA guidelines into filtering categories for technology coordinators:
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Solutions will vary from district to district due to any vendor’s installed filtering solution. However a technology coordinator can edit filtering settings. Combined with Mudcrawlers (see below) the district or library can stay up-to-date with the newest sites and pages that conflict with CIPA guidelines.
Powerful video that moves/educates students
There are very compelling education-related videos on YouTube including Michael Wesch’s Web 2.0: The Machine is Us/ing us. Michael has also shared some rather powerful statistics regarding YouTube here. The page was last updated in March of this year so consider those numbers higher today. And if you think those are powerful, consider the staggering numbers for FaceBook here. Again parents, teachers and administrators need to understand how students already use the internet.
Just like other Web2.0 media sites that popped up on the internet, YouTube gained traction and became a powerful location to upload videos for free. No thought was put into establishing an educational access point when YouTube was launched…the founders were burning through credit cards just to keep the site live. So from the beginning YouTube was not built to become a video warehouse for education. However with their overwhelming exposure and free access for everyone it has become a popular resource nevertheless.
Test Michael’s video and test your school’s filter at the same time:
1. The URL for his video is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g
2. Copy/Paste this link into your browser.
3. Does your school district block access to this video?
4. Does the video play immediately? Does it take a long time to play?
Filtering options
School districts have implemented filtering solutions from 8e6, Barracuda, Fortinet and others. WiscNet, the educational and research StateNet in Wisconsin partnered with 8e6 Technologies to provide Wisconsin school districts and libraries with two options addressing filtering:
1. Offsite filtering: Central
Central hosting permits schools and libraries to connect via proxy servers to WiscNet’s centralized filtering server. Each district’s technology coordinator(s) work with WiscNet to configure DNS and also configure all web browsers used by students, teachers and staff to redirect every requested URL to the central filter for analysis. The district’s technology coordinator is authorized to log into their district profile and add or block additional pages on demand.
2. Onsite filtering: Local
The second option places a filtering server onsite inside a district’s server room. There are advantages to installing a local content filtering box. In addition to the features in the central server, a local filter has the ability (if it matches the district’s technology policy) to block IM traffic and even streaming media. Local filtering can also leverage a district’s LDAP server and link filtering rules to the district’s network directories (students, faculty, staff and administrators) thereby syncing the filtering solutions to user groups at elementary, middle and high school facilities including any administrative buildings connected to the districts’ network. This has also been extended to laptops used at schools and libraries.
Reporting Tools
8e6’s servers have reporting tools that permit logging URLs requested by a single laptop or an entire classroom of computers. If a teacher feels a student may be veering away from online class assignments, a realtime probe tool can be configured to log all requested URLs from a student’s computer for specific periods of time. The results can be analyzed to determine the stated course of action outlined in the district’s technology policy:
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4. Warning and Timed Quotas
8e6 provides options to place a customized URL warnings regarding access by groups: students, teachers, staff/admin and guests. For example a district may recommend teachers, staff and administrators not visit eBay during the school day. The software permits a technology coordinator to attach a custom message to any web browser used by teachers, staff and administrators that requests any eBay URL. The message will remind the user that eBay is not approved under district policy, but does permit the browser to access eBay.
–Consider this a gentle hint hint - wink wink - nudge nudge reminder.
A recent feature added by 8e6 is “Timed Quotas” which permits a district to implement time limits for a website. District policy (again eBay for example) can dictate access to eBay not to exceed three hours a day.
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After eBay’s time quota has been reached the site becomes blocked for the rest of the day, with the site’s quota reset at midnight.
Tech Support’s cool factor:
Filter vendors and StateNet support teams who work in partnership with districts can log directly into a district’s filter (central or local) to address questions. The software even permits tech support teams to configure their own browser (via proxy) to point to the school’s IP filtering address, permitting them to “drop” their browser inside a district LAN. This allows tech support to access any URL in question (deny or pass) just as any computer connected to the district’s network. Reporting tools can generate Excel spreadsheets or email providing excellent data to troubleshoot URLs not playing well with filtering.
A word about big video websites
Heavily trafficked websites including YouTube have multiple servers to handle large numbers of visitors. When you need to block a popular site today you must use a filter’s ability to search for all addresses that answer to “www.youtube.com” because Google has established additional servers to handle heavy requests. If those are not included the videos will continue to be accessible:
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Mudcrawler
How does a school district keep up-to-date with all the new content uploaded to the internet outlined by CIPA? Vendors work with Mudcrawlers. What a job title eh? Mudcrawlers identify, locate and verify new content and proxy hacks in conflict with CIPA guidelines and upload those new URLs daily to vendors who then push updates to their installed machines at schools and libraries. This takes place on a daily basis.
Achilles Heel: Bandwidth
There are very important bandwidth considerations for accessing rich media content resources on the internet including YouTube from a classroom, teacher’s laptop or even “high tech” teaching labs. This all revolves around bandwidth.
The video’s file size does not matter since a teacher’s goal is to play the video online not download it. The video’s data rate (data transferred over the internet/per second) is very important for consistent playback. Depending upon the amount of bandwidth the school district has available smooth playback may occur due to bandwidth constraints.
Please remember a district’s total bandwidth is divided between the elementary, middle school, high school and district administrative offices. If a district has a 5 megabit bandwidth connection between the buildings listed above that means each building basically receives a single (1) megabit connection if configured by the technology coordinator or network consultant. Here is the data rate of Michael’s video: 466.9 Kbits/second - just under 470K of bandwidth per second.
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If a school district has a total bandwidth of just 3 Megabits/second it means SIX students (on six different computers at the same time) begin watching Micheal’s video — the entire bandwidth for the school reaches saturation. In other words the network crawls.
Test Michael’s video and test your technology coordinator’s nerves:
1. Learn how much bandwidth your school has established across the entire district: how much for each building linked to the school’s LAN.
2. The URL for his video is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g
3. Copy/Paste this link into your browser.
4. If the video plays, does the rest of the district’s network slow to a crawl?
5. What happens in a classroom with 20 computers? 10MB/second requirement.
Ironic that my roadrunner cable modem at home provides a 6.5megabit download speed to a single computer. $44/month minus taxes.
Attention Technology Coordinators: Get your geek on
Wesch’s video is not a RTSP stream but rather a static clip that gets pushed over TCP/IP. In a low bandwidth situation TCP will automatically rebroadcast dropped packets. YouTube is going to be flooding your pipe rebroadcasting those dropped packets and causing your network to slow down.
Low Bandwidth = High Shapers
Clearly school districts have insufficient bandwidth to view YouTube like content. Bandwidth can be saturated quickly by the demands of rich media. Example: Grab NASA’s video stream of a live shuttle launch. The raw feed could require 8Mb/second connection, which would kill a district’s entire bandwidth to the internet.
Short term solution
Install a packetshaper. Packetshapers permit a district technology coordinator to limit the amount of bandwidth specific protocols can access. A science teacher wants to permit students to watch the shuttle launch and listen to commentary by NASA. A Tech Coodinator can limit RTSP (the protocol passing the live video) to just 100K/second for every computer on the network - district wide. However this packetshaping configuration will kill the video in two ways: first the limit on bandwidth would result in a stop-start-stop-wait-start-stop effect, second it would take a very long time to download the video to a students computer to watch the launch.
Long term solution
Get more bandwidth. If you live in Wisconsin you need to get in touch with WiscNet, Wisconsin’s StateNetwork. Check out this article: WiscNet helped a K12 District increase their bandwidth from 3MB/sec to 100MB/sec for just $75.00 more a year via GrowSmart.
Educators please recognize HD video lectures from Museums and Colleges have been available to K12s on the Research Channel and Internet2 via your StateNet.
Love the fact Missouri K12s have been video conferencing with Museums in London for four years!
Powerful content awaits both teachers and students.
Real World challenges: We don’t plan to fail, we fail to plan
Regardless of filtering solution, frequent “fire drills” revolve around allowing blocked sites to be unblocked for a teacher’s request, class assignment or guest speaker. Yet due to the workloads of almost every high school technology coordinator, requests arrive less than 10 minutes before the class or speaker is scheduled. Fire drills that often frustrates everyone in the process.
Q & A:
Q: I’m frustrated when YouTube’s webpage is still not showing the video.
You and me both. Multiple answers here:
Answer #1: Google pushes many URL resources into a single YouTube page.
Those embedded URLs may be blocked by CIPA categories. If just one of those pushed URLs from Google is blocked, the entire page AND the video will not play:
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The interesting and troublesome issue is that most YouTube pages do not carry the same embedded links and URLs, so trying to write a generic allow (or bypass) rule will be very difficult.
Answer #2: Copyright infringement.
The video is pulled by YouTube due to legal action. No technology workaround is going to show it. Google statement regarding copyright killing video here
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Answer #3: Bandwidth
Spinning cursor loading selected video never stops. See Achilles Heel (above)
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Answer #4: The user deleted the file.
There is no magic like having someone delete a video from their account after its been talked about. Bummer.
Q: Is YouTube automatically blocked by CIPA ?
A: Yes and No. YouTube has videos that definitely fall outside CIPA guidelines forcing filters to block access to YouTube. Districts can permit access to areas of YouTube by adjusting the settings in their filters or allowing custom bypass rules:
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Q: What does a blocked page look like ?
A: For a filter than BLOCKS videos from YouTube based upon a CIPA category of R Rated, the filter pulls this report which spells out the category and URL upfront:
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Q: Can YouTube flag videos for K12?
A: Today citizens around the world upload over 150,000 videos every day to YouTube. Trying to hire someone to flag videos for K12 would be an overwhelming task. Consider this: ABC Television has been broadcasting for 60 years. The first television broadcast was in April 1948 and if you added all the video ever broadcast since 1948 it would total over 500,000 hours.
YouTube has produced more hours of content in just the past 5 months.
Q: Does all YouTube video playback at the same rate ?
A: No. Depends upon how much the person who uploaded the video knows about video codecs (compression/decompression) the data rate can be small or really big.
Ideas:
1. Google: set up K12.youtube.com so filters can automatically pass educational videos to schools and libraries. This would take some work on the backend, but boy it sure would help out K12s around the globe.
2. Apple: strengthen iTunesU’s existing K12 category by opening compelling video content clips for K12s.
See K12s own category within iTunesU here
Although I have read a number of tweets regarding educational YouTube-like websites all of them fail to scale to the demands of having industrial strength servers and network bandwidth capacity compared to YouTube or iTunesU.
Read More About It
Library.org: content filtering review here
PC Magzaine: content filtering review here
TopTen: home filtering review here
CIPA information via the FCC here
So why did it take so long to register that a blog post could benefit others by stepping outside the 140 character limit of Twitter? If you think this is a good knowledge sharing post, then please follow me here on Twitter.
Will be more than happy to answer additional questions. Let me know your thoughts.
Tags: content filter, CIPA, K12, education, technology, web filter, 8e6, bandwidth, broadband, internet, teacher, school, youtube, Michael Wesch, Twitter, WiscNet, web filter,trends
One Comment
Hi, Don,
Do you REALIZE how helpful this post can be in bridging the gap (and the hostility) between teachers and technology departments across our country? I hope every educator will read this!
Most educators have a very general understanding of the bandwidth challenges imposed by streamed video. They realize that video lags, drags and “times out” when bandwidth is low. They do not typically, however, connect bandwith limitations with blocked resources on YouTube.
Too often, educators surmise that YouTube resources are arbitrarily banned as “inappropriate content.” This supposition is reinforced each time a filtering system posts an “Adult Content” message when access is denied. The “teacher” in us rebels against such actions which appear to be thoughtless acts of blanket censorship. Emotions flare when the denied resource was the “key” that held promise for learning. Educators are quick to argue that filtering outstanding content deprives our students of their right to information. They are willing to take a strong stand on behalf of their students - and thus begins a passive and ACTIVE “attack” on IT departments.
Your post is one of a kind in my experience, Don. The effort you took to reduce the complex challenges associated with bandwith limitations into terms that educators can thoroughly digest and understand is most helpful. We are not often led with such care to a point of complete enlightenment. I cannot wait to share this message with educators far and wide. The “pull and tug” in school systems over this very issue drains energy and prohibits productive solutions. Knowing what I now know, I can see many paths to compromise. I am eager to support the IT department in their efforts to keep our networks running - and it appears that technical compromises can be made to meet the most pressing educational needs. The technical complexity of “assisting us” in providing video resources for students is now very real.
Thank you for letting us all walk in your “techie shoes” for this short while. We’ve always wanted to wear those shoes for a few short minutes, you know! Such an excellent post. Sincerely, thank you!
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