Superintendent: I’m new to my district. I spent the first year getting the lay of the land. I’m now ready to start making things happen when it comes to technology and our students but our technology coordinator is blocking me at every turn.
Me: You know, your technology coordinator works for you, not the other way around.
Superintendent: I know. We’re having those conversations but it’s difficult.
Me: Can’t you just say ‘Look, it’s a digital age and we need to be facilitating technology-rich learning experiences for our students. Now, I can hire a technology coordinator who can help me do this or you can be that person. Which would you like it to be?’
Superintendent: Yes! I can say that! Thank you so much! I don’t know, I guess I just needed someone’s permission to do this…
I’m not sure why, but I seem to have this conversation every couple of months with some superintendent somewhere in the country.
Many schools filter YouTube, Twitter, blogs, wikis, podcasts, social networking, and other content-rich online services for both students and employees. Why on earth would you filter the adults who work for you? This is a loser strategy that prevents educators from accessing potentially-powerful educational material and damages employee morale. Does this make sense to anyone? Nice job, administrators…
Although I empathize with the sentiment behind this idea, I confess I have some hesitancy about it. Unlike being handing an iPod loaded with podcasts, which involves no identity infringement, I think most folks would prefer to handle their own online identities. Choice of whether or not to join an online service – or even specific online account usernames and/or Twitter IDs – is critical, I believe, for online identity formation (e.g., I wish I had a common username across services instead of being mcleod in some places, scottmcleod in others, and something else in yet others; I choose to use some online services but not others). What you choose for others may not necessarily be how they’d like to be represented. Also, third parties will begin treating those individuals’ online identities as authentic and representative, despite the fact that you, not they, created them. Your representation may or may not be accurate or fair to the person who has an online identity that supposedly represents her but instead represents your perceptions of her. It’s already tough enough trying to get a handle on the variety of ways in which we can be represented online without our permission. Despite the extremely good intentions here, I’m not sure I’d agree that this is a good thing to do.
The essential question here is whether it’s okay to create an online service account in someone else’s name, regardless of how good your intentions are. Beth says that she would let her administrator fill in his own profile. But she already would have made the account…
Barry’s right and I’m wrong. I failed my own information literacy test. Why? Because even though I had access to (and linked to) the original report, I didn’t critically consume it the way I should have. Instead I relied on this report from CNN:
And because I did, I made an incorrect statement that then got retweeted by others. Shame on CNN for being misleading and/or inaccurate, but shame on me too for not doing my homework the way I should have. Just because CNN is a traditional, reputable news organization doesn’t mean that I don’t need to be a critical consumer of the information it provides.
Two girls post a cartoon video on YouTube that depict “The Top 6 ways to Kill Piper!” Piper is an elementary school classmate of theirs at Elk Plain School in Spanaway, Washington.
The police decline to file charges, saying that “We just don’t believe it was done with any malice or hate.” The girls who made the video apparently are remorseful, although it’s unclear whether that is because they a) now realize how hurtful it was to Piper, b) have been exposed to the larger ramifications of what they did, or c) got caught. Piper and her mother are understandably upset.
And the parents of the two girls? Well, one of the fathers was apparently too busy “cooking dinner” to talk to Piper’s mother about the incident. And, of course, the girls were able to spend hours making the video at home without anyone noticing and/or objecting. Nice parenting…
A fairly disturbing chain e-mail (it mentions rape, murder, and skin flaying) is making the rounds among a group of elementary school girls here. [click here to read it]
A few things to note about this…
Most parents of these girls had no idea that this was occurring because they’ve never, ever supervised their elementary school daughters’ e-mail use. Once they found out about this message, many were horrified.
Many parents are unsure whether they should be notifying other parents that their daughters are receiving and reading this.
Some parents’ reactions have been to see this as confirmation that ‘the Internet’ is ‘evil’ and to consider prohibiting their daughters from using it.
At least one parent’s reaction allegedly has been to declare, despite knowing the content of this message, that she doesn’t want to invade her daughter’s privacy because e-mail is like a diary or journal, trusts her daughter to do the right thing, and is (at least publicly) unconcerned that her daughter is passing this along to others.
I tell the administrators with whom I work that schools MUST play a role in educating children about appropriate Internet use. If they don’t, kids and parents will be left to fend for themselves and, as this incident confirms, many parents have little to no clue about what they should be doing in this area.
Sexual solicitation and predation are serious concerns, but the image presented by the media of an older male deceiving and preying on a young child does not paint an accurate picture of the nature of the majority of sexual solicitations and Internet-initiated offline encounters; this inaccuracy leads to major risks in this area being ignored. Of particular concern are the sexual solicitations between minors and the frequency with which online-initiated sexual contact resembles statutory rape rather than other models of abuse. Finally, though some technologies can be more easily leveraged than others for solicitation, risk appears to be more correlated with a youth’s psychosocial profile and risky behaviors than any particular technological platform.
School leaders and policymakers: Read the whole report. Check out the supporting materials. Look over the other recommended resources. Educate yourself so you don’t make policy based on erroneous assumptions. Please?
I had some pushback on that idea yesterday during a phone conversation with a school technology coordinator in another state. He basically said that he wasn’t buying my information libertarianism because most employers do some kind of content filtering for their adult employees. He was comfortable with his district’s current options for teachers to quickly request that particular web sites be unblocked.
What do you think? Do you agree with my stance that schools should be opening up the Internet to kids as they reach the upper grades? Or do you concur with the technology coordinator that schools don’t need to provide any more of an unfiltered environment than employers do?
