E-commerce: More Troubling Than Porn or Predators?

Kids know the drill. They're in school researching their reports on Ethan Allen, the folk hero of Vermont. They enter "Ethan Allen" into the search engine and the results tell them about a new bedroom set. Such, they learn, is life on the web.

Yet, a recent study by Thinkronize, the parent company of netTrekker, a search tool for education, found that educators see commercial pay sites just as big a threat to their students as exposure to pornography and predatory behavior. "It's not the dirt; it's the e-commerce," reads the first sentence of the report's summary.

The study indicates that four out of five (79 percent) school principals and administrators surveyed rank commercial and pay sites as their greatest concern. Sixty-one percent of survey respondents said pornography, and 58 percent said adult predators were a great or significant danger. Concern over getting useless or irrelevant results when using search engines was also high, at 59 percent.

The complete findings are not yet available online, but I spoke with Randy Wilhelm, CEO of Thinkronize, who reiterated that while pornography and predatory behavior were certainly high on the list of troubling issues, commercial web sites that interfere with online research topped the educators' list of concerns. (Wilhelm's company, netTrekker, keeps children on task by using a combination of technology and humans (educators) to create a list of more than 180,000 sites that kids can rely on for research.) Wilhelm suggested that many schools have already learned how to filter for pornography and predators and are viewing commercial sites as the next hurdle.

"The web," says Rita Phillips, technology coordinator for the Sacramento City Unified School District, who's quoted in the report, "is creating a new front of concern as we can't control our students getting redirected to sites that are both unevaluated and irrelevant. We have taken steps to block access to music and video downloads as well as blogs, MySpace, and gaming sites, but we are still very concerned about our students being redirected to the plethora of commercial sites."

Tell me what you think. Are the distractions of commercial web sites a growing problem in your child's school?