A Custom Objectionable Word List Ate My Homework 386
theodp writes "Among the first three schools using Chromebooks for Education is the Merton Community School District, which decided to go Chromebook after the Wisconsin Dept. of Public Instruction (WDPI) issued a news release (created using PDFMaker for Word) announcing that all Wisconsin schools can have access to Google Apps for Education by simply downloading a Google Consent Form (Microsoft Word format, oddly) from the WDPI website, completing & signing it, and submitting it to Google. And to help get the schools going, a separate Wisconsin Google Apps for Education website aims to jumpstart things with weekly webinars, the first of which — Getting started with the Google Apps for Education Control Panel — shows school officials how they can sandbox 'Naughty Students' and filter objectionable content. While Google illustrates how a list of 'custom objectionable words' can be used to flag and/or block students' e-mail with some cute examples — different spellings of 'booger' and a regex to block variants like 'b00g3r' — things get considerably nastier in the real world, as this NSFW custom objectionable word list used by the North Canton City Schools shows."
Re:What an Unreadable and Horrible Summary (Score:4, Interesting)
I can understand the school's desire to maintain a certain level of maturity, but this needs to be the job of the parents and teachers, not the technology. As a father of two boys, I want them to have the opportunity to act stupid, so I can correct them and tell them what is and is not appropriate. I don't want a computer enforcing that for me.
I am of the opinion that such censorship maintains immaturity. Everyone curses. Learning where it is appropriate and where it is not is a part of growing up, and school children should be able to figure out for themselves where it fits. Certainly I would expect to see many of those words appear in any kind of creative writing homework.