According to an article in the BBC News,
The Chinese government has clamped down on the amount of time youngsters can spend playing online games, according to the official news agency Xinhua. Under-18s who play for more than three consecutive hours a day will have limits imposed on the amount of points they can score, the agency reported.
Gamers playing for more than five hours will get no points. A teenager was interviewed for the NPR segment, and said that they have already figured out how to get around the software - they register with someone else's name who is over 18.
All of this makes me think of the discussion about filtering in schools here in the states. I read Steve Dembo's TechLearning blog post last night, since it relates to the message he delivered to our Walled Laked teachers during his keynote address at our Spice it Up Technology Conference. One of his main points that I heard is that we cannot block all the social networking sites to protect our children.... they know how to get around the filters and restrictions that we set. They use on-line social networking sites at school and at home. The key is EDUCATION. Since Steve's keynote, I have been thinking about strategies to employ to make on-line safety education a part of what ALL teachers do in Walled Lake, K-12. The students who spoke at the Spice it Up Student Panel agreed that on-line safety has not been addressed much by their teachers. Awareness is the first step, so I suppose broadcasting Steve's message (that we taped) so that all the folks who did not hear it should be a priority. Then what? How do we ensure that the education is not done in a "hit and miss" fashion? Yes, all 8th graders have on-line safety instruction as a part of the NCLB 8th grade tech literacy requirement. This is obviously not enough! Please add your ideas as a comment to this post. Thanks!
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