Ethics and blocks

Been thinking about the tensions surrounding Web 2.0 technologies in schools. Had a staff meeting after school where we talked about safety in two contexts - of our ICT hardware, and of the students themselves.

Different LEAs have more or less restrictive policies of allowing access to social networking sites - ours is very conservative, blocking all blogs as a matter of course, as well as YouTube, facebook, bebo et al. Other authorities' policies have different levels of access for staff and students, which clearly broadens opportunities for teaching. Of course, students find proxy sites and get round blockers - which has the ironic result of teachers actually having less internet access than many of the children in their classroom...

One argument put forward about blocking 'user-defined content' is for the security of school networks - I'd be interested to see research on how unsafe (in terms of virus transmission and the like) sites like YouTube, facebook (and the rest) are. Are there cases of educational or business networks being harmed by access to social networking?

The other safety fear is for students - and clearly 'cyber-bullying' is a very real issue, as well as 'unsavoury characters'. I think my worry here is that if the educational establishment absents itself from sites like bebo, then we leave them as unsupervised spaces. Should we, as teachers, know more about these places and help to guide our youngsters through them?

And there are issues about ethics as well, in terms of teachers' contact with pupils in these areas. While I would not add a student as a facebook friend, I know I have twitter followers within the school, and run a ning with my creative writing group. What are the differences, and where do we draw lines?