Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Zero tolerance strikes

Where's the spell-checker when you really need it? SLJ's Bowillan's Blog
today includes a story about a ten-year-old banned from Club Penguin because she made a typo and wrote "sex" when she meant "sec". It's easy to see how that would happen, and any human being who looked at the message "I'll be back in a sex" would guess what had happened, but the unforgiving computer that monitors Club Penguin automatically bans anyone who slips. Club Penguin is a useful site for young computer users and it's too bad they don't correct this problem before too many kids are hurt by being kicked off a site. (Of course, they may be working on this as I write and if they are, they get a gold star.) As librarians and parents, we should remember not to jump too fast and scold children for inadvertent mistakes that make make them seem subversive when they are only making the same kind of mistake adults make every day. We must keep our human eyes alert to check the mindless settings of the computer systems we let our children use.

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