No YouTube? No problem! How to view any site you want from within China!

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Here we are again, upset over the Chinese internet police’s blocking of another website we love to use in our classes. First it was Blogger, now YouTube and Wetpaint, both sites used extensively here by teachers in our attempt to connect students with the outside world through technology.

I was chagrined to find my two class wikis (Welker’s Wikinomics and History Happening)blocked on September 29, along with the rest of Wetpaint’s 600,000 wikis. Last week a rash of emails reverberated though our school’s inboxes when teachers and students found access to YouTube blocked, a first in the year and a half I’ve been in Shanghai. Both of these Web 2.0 tools are used extensively among teachers at SAS; in my case my Economics wiki is an integral part of my course grade.

So, for three weeks we’ve been trying to figure out how to regain access to these sites. We found that through proxy servers like iphide.com, anonymouse.org, proxify.com and others we were able to view our wikis, but not log in and edit them. Of course, a wiki that can’t be edited is like a delicious pie that can’t be eaten… it’s nice to look at but really, what good is it to us as teachers?

Students who no longer have to keep a wiki updated may have mixed feelings about their site’s plight… among my students I heard some express genuine concern and sadness that the resource was inaccessible and thus feared their learning would be impaired, while others seemed relieved that for the time being they had a little less work to do for my class.

But when YouTube became blocked last week, there was an unambiguous declaration of anger and frustration among students, many of whom rely on the video website for hours of entertainment here where the excitement provided cable TV amounts to roughly the same sensation experienced from watching paint dry. Nothing drives teens to action more than restricting their access to free videos of pop-song-lip-syncs and hairbrained-backyard-stunts-gone-wrong. So I was not totally surprised when, only four days after the YouTube ban, a tech-savy teen emailed me with the solution to all my problems (well, almost).

At 10:30 on Saturday evening, after an evening out, I checked my email to find that one of my AP Econ students had written saying she’d found a program that allowed her to access the wiki and make edits. I hardly believed her, since this very goal had consumed me unfruitfully for three weeks previous. But I gave it a shot, and found that indeed, the solution was real! The program she discovered is called “Hotspot Shield”.

Once installed and activated, it gives anyone surfing the net on an open access wireless network an anonymous IP address, apparently one located in the US. Since activating Hotspot Shield, I have been able to access all the sites that in the past have been blocked. Better yet, the program appears to allow all Java and AJAX scripts to function smoothly and uniterrupted, which none of the proxy servers I had tried did, which means you can watch YouTube videos, log in to and edit interactive sites like wikis, and do pretty much everything as if you were surfing the net from within the United States (or any free country, for that matter!)

The only downside that I’ve been able to determine is that it will not activate the anonymous IP address for your computer if you are accessing the internet from a secured wireless network, such as the one we have on our campus here at SAS. From home I am able to access all sites previously blocked, including BBC, Wikipedia, YouTube, Wetpaint wikis, and so on. From school, however, I am still subject to the Chinese firewall, unfortunately. The one exception, quite inexplicably, is my own Econ wiki. While Hotspot Shield was unable to issue me an anonymous IP today, for some reason I still had full access to view and edit my wiki, but ONLY from the computer on which I had installed the program from home over the weekend. When I tried to load the wiki from another computer, it would not load. STRANGE! If anyone can explain this, I’m all ears!

So, if you’re fed up with the Chinese firewall like many of us are, give this program a shot. It’s free, takes 30 seconds to download and install, and as far as I can tell works flawlessly from any unsecured wireless network. No YouTube? No problem! (Just don’t alert the net police!!)

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