One More Try

    Miguel has written an article that formalizes some of his thinking on filtering and blogging and creating separate spaces for schools to use for creating learning networks.  My applause to him -- it's getting published in a couple of places.  In addition to being amazed by his ability to churn out a ton of good quality stuff on a regular basis,  I think he does a really fine job of laying out the issues -- for the most part.
    Here's the section I have the problem with (his text in blue, my comments in italics):

Unfortunately, most had not heard of virtual spaces like MySpace.com. But after we discussed the benefits, the question they had was, “Can we guarantee that all teachers will supervise students appropriately? Can we prevent teachers from letting students use these resources inappropriately?” The answer, evident to all present, was “No.”

If you can't trust your teachers, don't you have a bigger problem than blogging in the classroom?  Also, you can't prevent that all students will use their hands appropriately -- should you immobilize all children when they walk in the front door?

With that conversation in mind, and as a result of a podcast posted by Bud the Teacher where he challenges the idea of filtering out commercial blogging sites, I have a few questions to ask as well:

1. Do the benefits of access outweigh the dangers to our children?  A fair question -- and one I struggle with myself.  Another one, just as important, is this:  What are the real dangers?  Not the perceived or extremely rare potential ones, but the actual, likely ones?
2. What right do we have to expose children to danger for educational purposes without parental consent?  We don't.  Who's advocating blogging without parental consent?  I require permission slips before blogging begins.  Our district also has an AUP in place. 
3. Do parents—who may be technology illiterate—truly understand the dangers their children face when they are turned loose on home computers?  Another really good question -- but the same question can be asked of parents and literature that they haven't read that we're asking their kids to read.  And, if it is the place of schools to ask this question, then shouldn't we also try to address the need for parents to be more technologically literate?  Can we teach both the parents and the students?        
4. Even if these benefits outweigh the dangers, and parents are complicit, can school district administrators and teachers really choose to endanger children simply to teach them the art of digital conversation and create personal learning networks?
   

   Why is blogging with students immediately equated with endangering children? I don't see how you get there.

As a parent, I want to sign-off on any use of virtual spaces that my sixth grader engages in. She is a budding flower, and like any dad, I'm worried and want to protect her. The fact is that she has an naivety and innocence to her interactions with others. It is difficult to impress upon her the dangers of real people as sexual predators, much less virtual predators she will not see coming until it is too late.

    I very much respect Miguel's desire to keep his daughter and students safe.  I share his concerns. My daughter is younger than his, and I want to make sure that she's as protected as possible as she moves through life.   But I don't know how you get from blogging to endangerment, unless you think that blogging is really all tied up in sites like Myspace.com.  Myspace.com is to blogging what the Weekly World News is to journalism.
    I teach journalism, but let me assure you that I do not teach from, nor recommend my students read the tabloids.    And I don't send students to Myspace.com. 
    But I do think that there's value in the potential to have a public audience.  I do find value in the idea that students can create content that will be useful to others.   I like the idea that schools are bigger than the buildings that contain them.  The Internet makes that possible.  Closed networks create digital schools that aren't too much different from the schools we've got now. 
    I said this in my podcast the other day, and I think it bears repeating -- there is value in building school-only networks and creating school-only blogs.  But is there more value in public spaces?  I believe there is.  Yes, there's also potential risk -- risk that I think can be moderated and minimized.  But, I'll acknowledge, not one hundred percent eliminated. 
   Of course,  there's risk in crossing the street.  Last I checked, we were still sending kids outside and teaching them to look both ways before they hit the crosswalk.
    I don't know that Miguel and I are going to agree on this, and I don't intend to keep volleying back and forth -- I'm sure he has better things to do.  I think the point, at least on my end, has been made.  But I wonder what gets filtered next, after the commercial blogging sites are gone. 
    Doug's written a very interesting post about this conversation, too.  But I need to reread it a few times before I'm ready to comment.  As usual, the writing's good and the ideas are better.  Here's the conclusion, good words to end a day with:

We have to engage students in discussions about things that matter to them and act as guides and interpreters to the world they are living in. Choices, yes absolutely. It’s how students learn. Authority, yes as well. It’s our duty. Kids need all manner of guidance, and they look to us for leadership. They also trust us to keep them safe. We owe them the benefit of our experience and our knowledge of the world. The balance between responsibility and the need students have to take a risk is real, but it’s not a static limit. It shifts and moves with each individual. None of the institutional barriers restricting access to information will matter if we are truly engaged in honest dialog with our students. I don’t believe there is a choice for us to make between one extreme or another. I think we have to be both ally and authoritarian, depending on the circumstance. Dialog is key. When we speak from our hearts to theirs they know we care. Our challenge is to help students imagine a better future than the one that will be handed to them by default. How we do that is a creative process that nobody - to my knowledge - has mastered.

 

                    

Comments

[Miguel Guhlin]

Bud, were I in your shoes, I would argue the exact same points and lose...in fact, most of these sites are blocked already by content filtering folks. However, I'm not in your shoes. I have to find a path between the risk you would deal with in your classroom and procedure that blocks inappropriate adult sites--including virtual spaces like MySpace.com, Flickr, and others. The sad part of this story, is that others also see the necessity of blocking sites, as poor a solution as it is, as the only way to protect the District, teachers from liability. They don't like the solution either, but that's the imperfect compromise. It's acceptable because it safeguards are children and District.

To deal with the trust issue, I agree completely. I have made these points myself. We just don't trust our teachers--to run their computers, to teach information literacy, etc. In Districts with integrated learning systems, lock-step scope and sequences that must be followed religiously, it's clear they are not trusted to even teach. The reasons that happens are legion, but I'm sure you can concede the point that trust is not something teachers enjoy universally in the United States...perhaps, in Latin American countries, but not here in the U.S.

I agree with your other points about parent training and literature.

Ah well. Thanks for the conversation on this topic! May we have more!

[Will R.]

Great post Bud! And nice response, Miguel. This is exactly why kids should be blogging.

Having said that, I'm with Bud. The "safeguards kids" line really, really bothers me. It doesn't safeguard kids in the least because it teaches them nothing. It's all about liability, and it would be refreshing to see someone admit that.

And MySpace and Flickr as "adult" sites? Wow. If that's the standard, I hope you're turning off every television set in your district.

And what a sad commentary on education to say that we can't trust our teachers to teach. We are in a mess of trouble if we just accept that as reality.

We cannot protect our children all the time in every way. We can, however, teach our children to help protect themselves. That's not happening in this instance.

[Miguel Guhlin]

I've responded to this online at:
http://www.mguhlin.net/blog/archives/2005/11/entry_680.htm

"We cannot protect our children all the time in every way. We can, however, teach our children to help protect themselves. That's not happening in this instance."

The statement that we cannot protect children all the time in every way is a straw man. The truth is, we are obligated to protect our children as much as possible within our power to do so. We can also teach them to help protect themselves. They are not mutually exclusive points as implied in the comment.

We can teach our students to avoid predators without having them actually encounter one. We can teach them to not talk to strangers except in controlled environments, make character judgements, and more...that's the beauty of skits, simulations, and problem-based learning.

We can teach them to blog, find their own voice in podcasts, connect with each other to build personal learning networks without misappropriating adult spaces (e.g. adult in this case is defined as places where nude/naked tags result in pictures that would not be shown in K-12 schools without getting teachers fired and students censured).

Finally, yes, this is about district liability. This is about being accountable. And, if the teaching methods are unsafe, or expose students to environments that are dangerous, then districts should be liable to parents. As teachers, we exercise significant power within our sphere of influence--the classroom. That influence must have boundaries set by the District policy and procedure.

Should we as teachers--and that includes the teacher that doesn't give a hoot about blogging and let's them go out unsupervised without clear paremeters--allow abuse of the tools we provide our students, then we are liable.

Thanks for the dialogue!

[TR]

Anybody had a look at this? http://www.eff.org/bloggers/lg/faq-students.php