virtually a librarian

The Other Librarian makes a really useful analogy about swimming and the web. If we want to protect our kids from drowning, we teach them to swim, and we supervise them. Ideally, if we don’t know how to swim, we could (should?) learn to swim ourselves so we can save them if the need arises. It’s a no-brainer, right?

The same should apply for the web. To ’save’ kids from the potential ‘dangers’ of the web, we should teach them to swim (or surf safely). And if we aren’t the best swimmers (or surfers) ourselves, we should send them to a swimming (or web) school where they can learn what they need to know. Better still, if we only know how to tread water, we should send ourselves to swimming (or web) school too. And then we should be the lifeguards by the pool, giving advice.

We don’t drain every pool, pond, or other water-holding vessel our children are going to come into contact with to save them from drowning. We teach them how to deal with the water - and have fun in it. I wonder, is filtering Internet content akin to draining our pools of water?

Thanks for the analogy, Ryan. I love a good analogy (clearly, cause I just went to town with this one). This is one issue that I’ll personally find a lot easier to talk about with this kind of simple, on-the-money analogy up my sleeve.