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It's been quite a week....

Last Friday, Cedar Falls experienced one of the worst storms I've ever seen. We've lost thousands of trees, numerous homes and businesses have been damaged and there has been one gigantic mess to clean up.

Educators often talk about the "teachable moments" when a child is actively interested in learning something and a opportunity to really help them learn is readily at hand. I had just such a moment this morning with my son Sam.

Christopher Dawson has an excellent article on ZDNet this morning about teaching children by example. He makes a good point about the importance of being active in our children's lives and teaching them how to behave, both online and offline, by example. Yes, that's difficult, but we are talking about parenting. :)

Kids learn from the examples we set

As I've stated before, one purpose of this blog is to review products that may (or may not) be useful tools for parents. The first tool evaluated and reviewed is OpenDNS.

Any discussion concerning the challenges of parenting in the age of the Internet at some point usually involves someone will come out in favor of stronger laws to protect our children. While I can certainly relate to the urge to make things better, I'm also beginning to realize the full complexity of these problems.

I recently completed a very well designed course in web application security put on by the SANS Institute. My job at the University of Northern Iowa involves managing web servers, including online learning systems, general web servers and specialized web based application servers. As you might imagine, security is a large and growing aspect of my job. While the training focused manly on highly technical issues, one concept that came up again and again was that the most vulnerable part of the web is the end user.