Rethinking AUPs

A few resources dedicated to rethinking acceptable use policies (AUPs) in schools.

1. Getting in the Right Mindset

In all of our efforts to teach students safe, appropriate, and responsible technology use, are we forgetting the more important job of teaching our students empowered use?

2. Some Student AUPs

3. Other Resources

4. Employee AUPs

What would you add to these lists?

6 Comments

  1. Darren Draper

    Nice list of resources here, Scott.

    In your opinion, what is the purpose of policy?

    Reply
  2. Scott McLeod

    Great question, Darren. In my opinion, public school policy should enable optimal empowerment of individuals within a school or district to meet personal, organizational, educational, and societal goals. Some policies promote certain behaviors while others limit or place structure on behaviors, but either way the end goal should be optimization of empowering environments. Where I think policy typically goes wrong is when somebody’s fears, agendas, or other issues result in policies that get in the way of people and/or schools being able to do what they’re supposed to be doing.

    What would you say is the purpose of policy?

    Reply
    • Darren Draper

      I like the idea of policy enabling empowerment, and am hopeful that more might assume such an attitude while thinking through its development.

      Additionally, I view policy as an opportunity to help cooler heads prevail.

      Reply
  3. Jeff Cooper

    Hi Scott,

    One way we can turn around “reactive filters” (the types that stop kids from going to ‘Russian Midget Porn’ etc.) is to convince Google Education to use their datamining capabilities to good use, namely, sharing all sites searched for and visited *with classmates and teacher*.

    This is what I call “proactive filtering” that teaches students to be responsible, and helps them build up their own “cool sites” d-base with their peers.

    Take a look at http://snurl.com/boredom2 (my response to Elizabeth English’s article “Why So Many Schools Remain Penitentiaries of Boredom). I presented to TICAL today, and EVO13 Online a month ago (where I talk on Blackboard about that presentation, contact me if you’d like to see it).

    Keep up the good work! I’ve made a shortcut to this page: http://snurl.com/rethinkingaups

    Reply
  4. Mick Huiet

    I read this and immediately followed the “AUP of the Future” link a while ago. When I read my end of course COETAIL assignment to collaborate with folks in our cohort to rewrite our school AUP, I had to backtrack in my reading list to find it. Tremendous resource.

    Our school has minimal filtering on, but we do monitor for the biggies. In our first six months of 1:1 rollout, we’ve only had a few issues. They are starting to get bidder though. I feel we’ve gone too fast without taking time to explicitly understand and internalize, at each developmental level, what our AUP really means. It is not written for students.

    It is my goal to come up with something short, sweet, and empowering on a student level. I have yet to dig much deeper in these resources, but I thank you for them sincerely! Mick

    Reply
  5. Rob Williams

    i’ve just started reading through this resource and loving it so far. Just spotted that the “27 internet safety talking points” links opens a page called “26 internet safety talking points” and I guess you changed it after you wondered what was going to happen when you got to Z 🙂

    Rob

    Reply

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