AssortedStuff

In his reflection on the speakers from the first day at the Building Learning Communities conference, Jeff articulates beautifully a major stumbling block we have in American education: fear.

In this case, fear of allowing too much of the outside world into the classroom, and especially the fear of allowing almost anything from inside out.

“There’s no way my district will ever let us use any of these social tools, they’re scared.”

I’m sure many of you have either said this or have heard someone who has said this.

Alan November kicked off the conference today with one simple message:  We need to break down the Firewall fear

The same country that believes in free speech and the freedom of the press is the same country with some of the most restrictive filtering systems in its schools.

In our overly-large school district, for what seems like decades, we’ve been working on “internet safety” rules/regulations/curriculums to go with the web filtering system, all in the name of protecting kids from… well, no one can articulate exactly what.*

But, as Jeff points out, protection is something we can’t give them.

We need to break through this culture of fear, we need to empower students to make decisions, to analyze and evaluate good content and learn how to avoid the bad stuff. We need to empower students to protect themselves.

At the same time our politicians and administrators also talk about teaching “21st century skills” (like communication and collaboration), and about how students must be “globally aware” citizens of the world.

Making that happen is impossible when there is no direct interaction with that world.  When all feedback on what students do in school comes exclusively from within that closed environment.

And it certainly won’t happen when we teach kids (not to mention the adults in their lives – parents and teachers) that the web is something to be feared, instead of helping them understand how to deal with it, the good, bad, and ugly.

Jeff is exactly right that “Creativity and fear do not mix.”

Creative people, something else we say we want our students to be, take risks.  They learn how to deal with failure.  They learn from and respond to their critics.

The last thing creative people do is hide behind a firewall.

*Maybe to protect us from the lawyers? Often it seems that’s the overriding concern.

blc, censorship, creativity, fear, filtering

Watch this.

Television is a drug. from Beth Fulton on Vimeo.

Except that it’s not just television anymore.

The same addictive, demanding nature could easily be ascribed to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Hulu, email, RSS, IM, FourSquare, mobile apps, or any of the exploding numbers of other sources demanding our attention.

Except that we no longer need to go over there to be distracted.

We carry it with us.

The challenge, of course, is finding the valuable little bits in that massive flow of crap.

Thanks to Clairvoy for the link (and for constantly giving me hell :-).

distraction, filtering, funny, media, television

When it comes to most web filtering systems the philosophy seems to be to try and find all the evil stuff on the web and then block it from being delivered to computers used by students.

“Evil”, of course, is a subjective qualifier and almost all the electronic nannies I’ve been subjected to adopt a sledgehammer, all-or-nothing “solution” to the process.

However, what if you approached the problem from another, smarter direction?

That’s seems to be what some schools in England are trying when it comes to YouTube, one of the web resources most frequently blocked by schools despite offering a rapidly-expanding amount of great teaching content.

Instead of blocking everything on a page, this particular filter screens out objectionable fluff around the edges of a video while letting the teacher-selected material show through.

Teachers say that they would use YouTube to access videos of scientific experiments that are too dangerous or complex to perform in the classroom, scenes from Shakespeare’s plays and footage of other cultures or foreign landscapes. The system is dependent on teachers submitting videos for approval. It then filters out content surrounding the footage and links to other films. A selection of suitable material is then created for other staff to use and for pupils to look at.

The article plays up the fact that this system will cost the schools up to £10,000 (about $16,000US) depending on the number of computers using the system, but that shouldn’t be the point.

We already pay large sums of money for the heavy-handed approach. Is there any good reason the all-purpose filters we use now couldn’t be configured to do the same thing?

Obviously, it’s simpler (and cheaper) for filtering companies to just block every site containing any material that might possibly offend someone, somewhere – and then unblock some pages when they get complaints.

But for the amount we already turn over to these “services”, we should be able to get intelligent electronic gates, programmed to be responsive to the needs of the people who should be trusted to differentiate good from bad when it comes to instruction, namely teachers.

england, filtering, youtube

Another interesting example of how attempting to filter information coming from the web doesn’t work all that well.

This situation has to do with a man who was convicted of murdering a well-known actor in Germany and is now out on parole, and who now wants Wikipedia to remove all mentions of his name from the article about the actor.

At issue is an apparent conflict between the U.S. First Amendment—which protects truthful speech—and German law—which seeks to protect the name and likenesses of private persons from unwanted publicity. Sedlmayr’s murderer became a public figure when he and his accomplice were tried for brutally killing the well-known actor, and contemporary newspapers published his identity at that time. Fifteen years later, according to his attorneys, German law views the killer as a private citizen again. So, his lawyers have sued the German language Wikipedia, and threatened the English language version with the same, if they fail to censor the Sedlmayr article.

This “private citizen” and his lawyers, and German law for that matter, don’t understand that a “world wide” web makes it pretty much impossible to completely insulate any country (or individual) from information they don’t like.

However, that’s also true for schools where we put a lot of effort into selectively censoring the flow, trying hard to control what information enters the classroom.

But we keep trying.

filtering, germany, wikipedia

Bud Hunt has written an excellent response to those teachers in his district who want the internet filtering system to do their jobs for them.

Here’s the essence of his post, something that should be at the heart of every district’s philosophy in this matter.

What we’ve decided is that we will no longer use the web filter as a classroom management tool. Blocking one distraction doesn’t solve the problem of students off task – it just encourages them to find another site to distract them. Students off task is not a technology problem – it’s a behavior problem. It is our intention that we help students to learn the appropriate on-task behaviors instead of assuming that we can use filters to manage student use.

Exactly right!

We constantly declare that technology cannot replace good teachers.

It’s even more true when it comes to classroom management.

bud hunt, classroom, filtering, management

I hear this from people all the time: “I can’t use YouTube.  It’s blocked in our school”.  Especially in high schools.

I wonder if the people who made the decision to add the video sharing site to their blacklist have actually looked closely at what is there.  At the ever expanding bits that could actually be used for learning.

Like the Periodic Table of Videos, wonderful examples of how to present chemistry concepts in ways that can’t be done in most classrooms that’s only one part of the growing collection of science materials.

The last election was played out in YouTube (now part of the historical record) as are current political debates, including the weekly addresses from President Obama and the Republican opposition.

And now more than 100 universities and other educational institutions are adding materials from their classes to the channels that make up YouTube EDU.

Plus the Library of Congress is preparing their own channel with hundreds of historical and cultural clips on YouTube (and iTunes, another resource increasingly being thrown behind the filter).

Of course there’s a lot of crap on YouTube.  You could say the same thing about television (which seems to be recyling the YT junk into an infinite feedback loop), movies, bookstores.

But isn’t that why we have teachers and librarians?  To help students find the good stuff out there in the world and teach them how to make the best instructional use of it?

It’s time for administrators (and many teachers) to get past the reflexive urge to block and ban anything on the web that’s popular with students, thinking that it must be educationally invalid.

We need to spend more time training teachers how to use these resources.

After all, live, intelligent filters are always more effective than the electronic ones.

filtering, teachers, video, youtube

Too much information.

For anyone connected to a digital network of any kind that’s either a fact of modern life or a hazard waiting in the wings.

However, a writer in the Op-Ed section of this morning’s Post believes that the “information avalanche” enabled by all our communications tools is also a potential danger to our democracy.

All of it “is burying us in extraneous data that prevent important facts and knowledge from reaching a broad audience”.

Or maybe his concern is that fewer people are reading big media publications like the Post.

Which highlights the larger problem: The overload siphons audiences and revenue from newspapers such as The Post and other outlets that can spread important information, forcing these media to shrink and to rely increasingly on advertising to stay afloat. These trends predate the Internet era, but they’ve gotten worse.

And, of course, it’s the technology that’s to blame.

Rather than call for government regulation of technology itself, perhaps the best way to limit the avalanche is to make the technologies that overproduce information more expensive and less widespread. It could be done via a progressive energy tax designed to keep energy prices at a consistently high level (while providing assistance to lower- and middle-income Americans).

In a companion to this stupid rant, Ben Stein, writing in the New York Times, also believes all our devices have become “modern-day balls and chains with which we shackle ourselves”.

What would we do if cellphones and P.D.A.’s disappeared? We would be forced to think again. We would have to confront reality. My own life is spent mostly with men and women of business. I have been at this for a long time now, and what I have seen of the loss of solitude and dignity is terrifying among those who travel and work, or even who stay still and work. They are slaves to connectedness. Their work has become their indentured servitude. Their children and families are bound to the same devices, too.

So, just get rid of the technology – or make it so expensive that traditional media is more financially attractive – and all will be right with our lives again.

However, the underlying message from both writers (and their editors) is that we would be far better off with a limited flow of information.

And that a few traditional filters of that information (like the Post, the Times, and Ben Stein) should be the ones telling us what’s important.

No thanks. I’d rather learn to sift through the flow of data myself.

filtering, information, media

How do you protect children from viewing inappropriate materials on the internet?

Evidently, the Children’s Online Protection Act (COPA) is not the way.

The US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit today upheld a ban on the enforcement of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), ruling once again that it was unconstitutional, overbroad, and vague. The American Civil Liberties Union, which challenged COPA on behalf of a coalition of writers, artists and health educators, hailed the ruling as a victory for free speech.

The constitution limits the government’s ability to censor web content and the electronic filters required of schools and libraries are largely ineffective.

Maybe it’s time to talk about an educational solution instead.

Training teachers to manage and use the web in their classrooms, and helping parents understand how to manage access at home, would not provide 100% protection for kids.

But it would be a far better approach than poorly written laws and the ham-handed use of electronic censors.

filtering, government, internet, legal

This morning at EduBloggerCon Jim Gates facilitated a very good conversation on internet filtering, although we had way too many people in the room to involve everyone.

It’s obviously a topic that touches a nerve with many teachers and others involved with technology in schools.

However, I still don’t understand the IT folks who insist on locking down computers used by students so that they become artificial environments – no right click, no access to CD/DVD/USB, extremely limited network access.

Reminds me of the dumb terminals we used a while back, an era I thought we had long since progressed passed.

Anyway, Jim’s goal was for the group to come up with ideas for an instructionally sound filtering policy that everyone could use in talking with their administrators and IT staff.

Unfortunately, we really didn’t have time to get much of that done, but hopefully it gave everyone a starting point. This is something that needs to be continued.

If you’re interested, Kristin Hokanson took notes using Cover It Live. Didn’t see anyone taking video but I wouldn’t be surprised if something pops up since there were plenty of those pocket-sized cameras around.

conferences, ebc08, filtering, internet, IT, necc08

I’m not a fan of internet filtering systems. At all!

Simply banning web sites doesn’t teach students anything about safely using the net and it excuses some educators from having to manage web access.

However, I do understand that filters are a political reality and that there is some material on the internet that needs to be blocked from student view.

But del.icio.us?

One high school in this area has added that seemingly benign utility to their blacklist because of how one student was using his account.

It seems he was posting recommended sites for his friends, some of which the school administration thought were instructionally inappropriate. Including new tools for bypassing the filtering system at the school.

So, we blame the technology and ban it instead of acknowledging that this student has a much better idea of just how useful del.icio.us is than his teachers do.

delicious, filtering, students