Peter Slattery

This I think is important. From Wes Fryer who constantly blogs (I can read his block because I have no filters) about the foolishness of internet filters in all sorts of places including schools. He found himself at a school trying to access Flikr and found himself blocked. He had this to say on 13th April 2010.

‘First of all, the technology director in the school holding our workshop had specifically whitelisted flickr.com the day before, on Monday. Yet today, on Tuesday, the site was mysteriously blocked again. I guess the district’s Internet content filtering could be considered, “highly aggressive.”

Second of all, the webpage title of this “blocked” message was:

busted

The English Wiktionary definitions for “busted” which apply in this case are:

Caught in the act of doing something one shouldn’t do.

and

Caught and arrested for committing a crime.

The normative message from this content filtering page is: You have committed a grevious error. You are in the wrong. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Perhaps we could go even farther. Is part of the message: Accessing websites not approved by our school district’s Internet provider is a big game, and for your last attempt we give you a score of ZERO?! You failed, you’re busted!

Internet content filtering is not game. It’s not funny, and I resent being shown a message which implies I’m a criminal when I’m only trying to visit a website which provides access to millions of educationally valuable, copyright-friendly images for teachers and students to use.

The third comment I’ll make about this “blocked” page is the message at the bottom. The assumption inherent in this offering of “alternative websites” (Google, Yahoo, CNN and Fox News) is that the only reasons a learner at the school would be using the Internet is to either search for information or read the news. These are CONSUMPTIVE activities. This supposedly “helpful” set of links on the block page (which I’m sure is viewed hundreds if not thousands of times over the course of a school year by students as well as teachers) completely misses the point that the Internet can be used, is being used, and SHOULD be used by learners for serious work CREATING and SHARING content on websites which power creative productivity. A mindset persists in schools and many businesses that “real work” on the computer is done only in Microsoft Office, and “the Internet” is used just to “look stuff up” and read the news. This perspective is sorely out of date.’

AND:

‘One of the teachers in our workshop today, when asked the question, “What instructions: guidelines do you give students NOW about getting photos to use in a video project?” responded:

Pictures must come from a legal website. No obscene pictures.

When I asked the teacher how he defined “a legal website,” he said it was a website which students were able to access because the district’s content filter allowed them to view it.

Let’s deconstruct this comment, because the assumptions here are a BIG problem. This teacher assumed that EVERY website which was NOT blocked by the content filter was OK. That somehow, the school’s Internet filter was acting as an all-knowing, uber-grandmother figure, granting permission and giving blessing to any site which was NOT blocked / on a blacklist. I regret to suggest this perception is common. I lament this perception, as well as its normality in schools.

Folks, WE are the filter. Our minds are the filter. Legality and ethics are not defined by the whim’s of an Internet service provider, a tech director who decides to block or unblock websites, or for that matter by a company which decides today “certain applications” are cardinal sins to own and use but tomorrow become authorized in “their online store.”

We make ethical decisions and judgements based on values, not based on the whims of organizations or individuals. I tried to make this point in our workshop today and my discussions with this particular teacher, but I don’t think I made much headway. The perceptions that “if the filter doesn’t block it, it’s OK for the kids to use in a video project” as well as the belief that “it’s not my job to make decisions about right and wrong online, since our content filter does that for us” are both erroneous and depressing at multiple levels.

We’ve got so much work to do when it comes to digital literacy and digital citizenship.’

More from Wes Fryer about censorship and the net, on what we can do, might do, should do, shouldn’t do…and picking the right response for the right event.

Blogging on 28th Jan 2010 Wes talks of an event in America that I didn’t know about. And what he has to say is this:

Today’s USA Today article, “Tennessee teen expelled for Facebook posting,” highlights the need we have in ALL our schools for social media guidelines. According to the article:

Taylor Cummings was a popular basketball star on the verge of graduating from one of Nashville’s most prestigious high schools until a post on Facebook got him expelled. After weeks of butting heads with his coaches, Taylor, 17, logged on to the popular social networking site from home Jan. 3. He typed his frustrations for the online world to see: “I’ma kill em all. I’ma bust this (expletive) up from the inside like nobody’s ever done before.”

Taylor said the threat wasn’t real. School officials said they can’t take any chances.

But the case highlights the boundaries between socializing in person at school and online at home. It also calls into question the latitude school officials have in disciplining students for their conduct online.

I think Jaime Sarrio’s choice of words in this introductory sentence is misleading. A “post on Facebook” isn’t what “got Taylor Cummings expelled from school.” Taylor’s decision to threaten the life of a school coach was the action which led to expulsion. The word choice of reporter Sarrio suggests the social media technology is to blame in this situation. Like many other scenarios, however, a social media platform provides documented evidence of inappropriate communication. The genesis of this problem does not lie with Facebook or social media more generally. As I stated in Wednesday’s post about the Pope encouraging priests to blog, in many cases “transparency is instructive and helpful, rather than undesirable.” That is the same point I made in my August 2008 post, “Josh Jarboe YouTube video controversy shows the value of transparent, publish-at-will technologies.”

There certainly ARE and should continue to be limits on the punishments school officials mete out in response to students’ off campus behavior with social media technologies. This case involving Taylor Cummings, who reportedly had a public Facebook page and was threatening school employees with physical violence, is very different from a case like that of Churubusco High School (Indiana) student athletes who were punished for slumber party photos they posted to a private Facebook profile over the summer. I wrote about this in November 2009 in the post, “Photographic privacy is over.”

What is your school doing NOW to proactively address these kinds of issues? Do you have a set of social media guidelines yet? Each of our schools do NOT simply need new “policies” to address social media issues, we need guidelines which can catalyze ongoing conversations about these issues and the themes of digital citizenship, digital reputation, and online ethics among all our school constituents. I have several good links to videos and other posts related to these issues on my T4T class overview under the heading, “Digital Footprints, Privacy and Information Disclosure.”

 

 

There is an ongoing debate about just what is good education, about how young people use the internet, and about what some describe as the ’slipping standards in education’. And there are cries at times for a return to more ‘traditional’ ways. Mind you sometimes ‘traditional’ ways seemed to include public floggings and other educational practices which now qualify as ‘extreme entertainment.’ But without embracing the extremeites of this argument, there do seem to be things to think about. And because I got carried away and now have kids, I now find these debates annoyingly personal.

Marc Prensky (speaker, writer, educational designer) is famous for coining the terms ‘digital natives’ and ‘digital immigrants’; …those who have been born into the digital age and those who have arrived here from another time. And yes, while geography and finances do make a difference, basically he is referring to younger and older people. Marc Prensky has, I think, a point. What older person ever found out how to work out the time delay on a VCR? (Really young people at this point are asking: what’s a VCR?). My three year old son has no fear of remotes or anything buttony…he just presses away furiously until something happens. He actually also knows how to use the remote for a TV, put on and play DVD’s, AND how to play a DVD via a Playstation. He knows how to use a computer mouse and how to click and drag. And before I get reported to the Department for the Preservation of the Purity of Children, let me say that I let him have no more than 10.5 hours screen time a day…okay, occasionally a little more. He actually watches pretty much no TV but does watch videos, and because we travel a lot and end up in motel rooms with the inevitable screen he has learned about some of these things simply from having it around him. The mouse-clicking I actually taught him.

It has come to my attention that the world is not going to go away. More than once I have tried to ignore it and when I turn around, it’s still there. And so my partner and I agree that giving our boy ZERO skills on a computer is not a great edge to have in this world. Okay. Decided. But then what?

Mark Bauerlein Professor of English Emory University of Atlanta tells a story of asking students to memorise 20 lines of poetry, and a student’s response to him was: ‘Why? It’s always there, a click away.’ Now I know I am ancient but the student’s response does seem a little disappointing. Professor Bauerlein goes on to argue that the value of actually doing this memorizing is that it is good for the muscle of memory, it also increases vocabulary and importantly the person ‘assumes another voice’, with the all the learning and insight that such a possibility offers. A reasonable argument.

Going in the other direction, if you want big advocates of E learning, look at the sites of Wesley Fryer and of Alvin Trusty. Both constantly have interesting, and at times not-so-interesting, to me, things to say. (I told you I was ancient. And really I am just saying I don’t sometimes understand the TEkniKAL stuff) and always they advocate for the newer paths.

As I write you can go to Alvin’s site and see what I think is a pretty ordinary picture with this next to it:

‘I should add one thing about that last picture. A bird had left a nasty white mark over three lines of text. The new version of Picasa easily removed the blemish. If you haven’t looked at Picasa in a while, you should take another look. I haven’t found another free picture manager that has nearly as many features.’

So for me, the fact that I think the photo of a sign is not very interesting is really unimportant. The very cool thing here is ‘Picassa.’ I might just have a look.

In addition, at the top of Alvin’s post is this:

‘My students are working on a PowerPoint file in class. I give them all the text. They come up with the pictures. All the pictures must be licensed with a Creative Commons license and several of the pictures must actually be taken by the student. The subjects of the photos are ordinary objects like pencils, pens and calculators.’

He continues to be an advocate of E education and in this simple sentence is also an advocate for the respect of the work and property of others. This gotta be not a bad thing. This very simple sentence below also really speaks a wealth.

‘That’s about it. The PowerPoint file is below shared on SlideShare. If you would like to see the work of my students, search for the tag. I wrote it in chalk on the second slide.’

In this one simple paragraph, we get to hear about SlideShare, and he includes the work of his students on his site, which just seems respectful too.

Wes Fryer’s blog of 21st July, and he is the world’s BIGGEST blogger, includes, amongst heaps of other things, this simple question and statement.

‘If you were going to start an after-school club at an elementary school focusing on exploratory and collaborative learning with Scratch software, what clever name would you give the club so it appeals to both boys and girls in 4th and 5th grades?

Bob Sprankle’s Bit by Bit podcast 84 inspired this question today.The book I tried to cite on this 6 minute audio comment is Coloring Outside the Line by Dr. Roger Shank.’

Okay, no big deal. But it represents E education. Wes assumes things still happen and need to happen in the classroom. He refers to software (yes, he is an advocate) and he, I think, generously and fairly, makes references to others. And because this is E learning, he gives the links.

There may be subliminal messages in all this that I am missing, and maybe Wes and Alvin have shares in various companies…I dunno…but none of this seems bad to me.

So where to from here? How much is too much? What is good clicking and what isn’t? When does the computer get turned off? All this is important. And of course you are not reading this via a piece of paper are you? So I guess you have taken some sort of stand, and like me, you will work it out. Or like me also, continue to be confused. Click……..?