One of the big questions we're dealing with right now in the Learning Library is how much we want to, and are able to, censor cussing and so forth within our Challenges. The Learning Library is essentially a tool which people can use to create their own Challenges, so we're really just concerned with the Challenges we're creating to populate the Library when it first goes live at this stage. Of course, it's important to protect children from inappropriate content. But the world is full of inappropriate content, and we don't want the Learning Library to feel toothless and out-of-touch.
One of the major questions that comes up has to do with some of the challenges that have to do with horror movies. It's really hard to show kids the difference between the movie The Shining and the remixed-to-seem-like-a-romcom trailer Shining if you don't want to show any violence or creepy imagery at all. But it surely wouldn't be okay to show a clip of a kid carrying a knife and croaking "redrum" in a school - would it?
Haven't kids of high school age already seen The Shining or even gorier, scarier film already? But can we rely on that, when only one parent's complaint could get a teacher or aide at an after-school program fired?
Similar problems come up with cussing. It's incredibly hard to put videos up about gaming without including some kind of cussing - and even interviews with kids about their gaming practices include it. The fact is, a lot of high school students cuss. How can we get around that? We want teachers to feel comfortable using our materials, but we also want kids to see that they aren't fake, that they're honestly things that people are putting up online and talking about.Â
One solution that we've been pioneering is providing a number of levels of interaction with potentially censorable content. A Challenge will include a video that has no cussing or violence or disturbing images in it, but below it there is a link - not an embedded video, but a link - to another, more edgy video, with warnings attached. That way, moderators - teachers and aides - can choose to use the edgy video or not, depending on what the atmosphere is in their program.
This isn't a perfect or a final solution by any means, but it's a first shot at trying to make the Learning Library safe without defanging it.Â
