Mr. Butler has been getting a great response to his book blog over at http://staff.bbhcsd.org/butlerj/archives/2007/03/16/first-two-weeks-a-smashing-success/
Mr. Wasil has also been having a lot of fun with his blog. Check out this post about passwords:
http://staff.bbhcsd.org/wasilt/archives/2007/03/23/changing-your-password-for-email-and-logging-into-your-computer/
Last week on the Ohio Tech Coordinators’ listserv, tech guy John Case tore the lid off the web filtering debate. He pointed out these facts:
John floated the idea of building an internal system which would allow students to participate in an online social environment within the school. This would take the “walled garden” approach of only allowing students within the school to read and add content. This is something we’ve tried on a very limited scale, and it has worked. The students can participate in an online community. They learn how to be responsible members of that community by not posting inappropriate content and not sharing personal information. Because they’re using their network accounts, all of their activity is identifyable, so they’re responsible for their actions. It has worked fairly well.
The problem is that it doesn’t truly give them the perspective that a global community might bring. I know that I have blog readers thoughout the US and in Canada, Australia, and Germany. While I don’t often get comments from these people, they read the pages or subscribe to the feeds and contribute when they’re moved to do so. In a closed system, we only have the people in the school who can contribute.
From the school’s perspective, if we block social networking sites, we can pretend to protect our students from accessing inappropriate content. But without a clear definiition of what a social networking site is, we end up blocking anything where users can contribute content. Increasingly, that’s a lot of stuff.
Consider this: Alexa attempts to rank the most popular sites on the web by tracking use of their toolbar. It’s not the most scientifically accurate way of measuring web use, but it does produce fairly believeable results. Of the top 20 sites listed, ten are blocked by our web filter. If we block every site that allows comments, or lets you share files, or uses email tools, we’re left with the static web of the 90’s, where all we can do is use it as a giant digital library.
Even beyond the social networking issue, there’s lots of material online that could be considered inappropriate. Last summer, as I was redesigning our schools’ portal pages (which are the default home pages on our browsers), I considered incorporating news feeds from various sources. After a couple days, I ended up burying the news feeds on a subpage rather than keeping them out front, because they almost always contain violence or sex. You can check for yourself on the news page from our high school portal. Odds are, there will be a link to some news items that we probably don’t want all of our students reading about.
At some point, we have to start teaching our students to be responsible Internet users. Most people don’t have filtered Internet access at home. Our schools are supposed to provide adult supervision in all areas where students are using the Internet. It may be time to stop relying on the technology to protect them.
I’m not saying that we’re going to turn off the Internet filter. The federal government has made sure that’s not going to happen. But maybe it’s time to stop worrying so much about what someone might post online, and start teaching our students how to behave responsibly — as both information creators and information consumers — in this environment.
By request, here’s the current version of my Wordpress Getting Started Guide. It’s specifically aimed at staff members in the Brecksville-Broadview Heights schools, but others may find it useful as well.
This document covers Wordpress 2.1, sidebar widgets, and all of the plugins we have installed. It was last revised March 1, 2007.
The New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative have released the 2007 Horizon Report. Each year, this report describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within
higher education. The report has been issued annually since 2004.
Within the next year, the report predicts that we will see a number of technologies gain widespread use in higher education, including user-created content, social networking, and mobile device convergence (is it a phone, camera, pda, or music player?). In the two-to-three year timeframe, look for increases in the use of 3D virtual environments (like Second Life), changes in the ways academic research and publication are done, and enhancements in the ways multiplayer online games are used in education.
There are no real surprises here. We’ve been batting around the web 2.0 buzzword for a couple years now, which describes the web as a collaborative space where people can create and interact with content. The web has become more than a giant library. Everyone can create content. Everyone can interact with the producers of web content. I’m posting this online, and it’s costing me almost nothing to do so. You can comment on this article, if you’re so inclined. Someone else may read your comment and want to chime in too. The barriers to participation are gone.
For me, the jury’s still out on virtual environments and online gaming. I don’t dispute their promise, but I’m not convinced the benefits are going to outweigh the high costs of the computing power and bandwidth needed to make them work. I’m not sure the benefits over simpler technologies like blogs, wikis, discussion boards, IM, and audio conferencing are worth all the fuss. At some point, I’ll show my age by explaining how Second Life is really just a Mud, but that’s another post.
Nearly as interesting as the Horizon Report itself is the Horizon Project Wiki, which documents the process of creating the report. It’s fascinating to see how the ideas are collected, researched, filtered, and finalized into the final report. It’s also fun to see the things that didn’t make the list.
This is just a test to make sure I can podcast and have it show up in the feed. I hope Andy doesn’t mind that I’m using his song.
