[MACEP] Websense questions

[Ben Mabbott]

Dan's Guardian can be configured to be very aggressive in what it 
blocks, or very passive, or anything in between. It isn't like most 
webfilters which just have a list of URLs they block. Dan's Guardian is 
a content filter, so it scans every webpage requested to see if it 
contains content it's been set to block. Which is why you may be having 
a different experience with it than folks in Portland. Whoever is doing 
the filtering, Forest Grove or maybe NWRESD, may have their server set 
to block more than MESD does. There's a lot of sharing of filtering 
methods between organizations in the area though, so they may be using 
the same filtering, and you're just running afoul of it more than your 
friends.

Most districts have some kind of procedure in place for requesting 
changes to the filter. It may be a tech or curriculum committee or a 
particular administrator, but someone should be able to hear your plea :)

-Ben

tbroeren at teleport.com wrote:
> Im teaching in Forest Grove, and we have Dan's Guardian, and I must say, 
> I DO NOT think it works well.  Far too many sites are blocked that make 
> it near to impossible for high school students to conduct any kind of 
> reasearch on the web.  Perhaps it has to do with how it is administered, 
> I would love to talk to the person that administers this.  The weird 
> thing is, I have talked to teacher friends in PDX area, and they have 
> said they dont have issues with Dan's guardian.
> 
> How can it be that it works differently for different folks?