I wrote this post on Monday and wasn’t going to publish it. Then I saw At the Schoolhouse Gate’s recent post about the student who was suspended for posting online a list of students he didn’t like (article here). Seems these here Interwebs have a lot of otherwise level-headed people going off half-cocked.
I’m an active researcher and reader on all things tech and education related, but I never considered the other side of the coin. Having attended a 3-hour meeting this morning at the district office on our “new” filter override process as it relates to CIPA, I am utterly shocked at some of the misinformation that some of my colleagues — intelligent, well-educated, experienced people — have come to assume as fact.
It’s put things into perspective for me, though. Discussing how and when to allow staff members to override the filter is only one piece of the puzzle. Where we consistently fall short is in educating our students and our teachers in responsible use of the Internet.
Overheard this morning:
- Reading a student’s MySpace page is the same thing as viewing the text messages or cameraphone pictures on a confiscated cell phone. Clearly this story out of Boulder has people a little bit gun-shy about what’s private and what’s not. I am not a lawyer, but I see a huge difference in terms of the expectation of privacy. I expect that pictures that reside on the memory card of my camera or phone are private. They’re mine. The second that I put them on Flickr or on my blog, however, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. So something a student has written on his or her (public) MySpace profile is “fair game,” so to speak. Going through the contents of their personal electronics (without reasonable suspicion or, even better, probable cause) is the 21st century equivalent of reading out loud the note you caught a couple of kids trying to pass during your lecture.
- But if a teacher doesn’t attend filter override training and uses some other, non-approved way to bypass the filter (read: proxies, vtunnel, etc.), that’s OK as long as the content they accessed isn’t inappropriate, right? I almost fell out of my chair when I heard this Machiavellian rationalization for what is essentially a violation of the district’s AUP that could result in termination. Circumventing the filter is wrong. People have been fired for less than that.
- Hey – have you guys ever heard of Web 3.0? Yeah. That’s Second Life, World of Warcraft – you know – that stuff. Huh?
To be clear, I don’t blame these individuals for not knowing this stuff, but the longer I sat in that meeting biting my tongue, the more frustrated I continued to get because these are the technology leaders in their respective buildings! We (and by “we,” I mean those of us “in the know”) need to be more cognizant of the fact that although this stuff is old-hat to us, it’s completely foreign to many of the people in our organizations.
Call it “Digital Citizenship” or anything else you want, the fact remains that we need to be focusing at least as much energy on educating students and teachers in information literacy as we do on trying to use brute force to protect them from themselves with poorly-implemented filters.
Scott- I’m attending this same meeting tomorrow in my district for building ET’s…I’m hoping the same conversations and misinformation that you experienced are not my experience also; I don’t have much hope for some forward thinking discussions…I’ll keep you posted.
Scott, Amen, brother! By “protecting” students at school, we are leaving them defenseless outside of school – where they spend most of their lives. Is information literacy instruction more dangerous than mandated health courses which (quite rightly) discuss the risk of unprotected and promiscuous sexual activity? Walls box out far more than they keep safely inside. diane
Another thing that I considered is that we keep kids “safe and secure” right up until the minute they graduate from high school. Then they go off to college or the work force where they have unfettered access to all things that are presumably just too “evil” to allow through the filter.
Is this at all like raising the drinking age to 21 to keep 19-year-olds from drinking? If they want it badly enough they’ll find a way. All we’re doing is creating a new class of criminal.
Scott, I just wanted to clarify that I posted the story on At the Schoolhouse Gate this morning. At the Schoolhouse Gate is moving to a collaborative blog of educational law folks instead of just Scott McLeod – and I was the first to post. Anyway, from your initial comment, I couldn’t tell if you thought positively or negatively of the Gate post and I didn’t want you thinking less of Scott because of my post. Otherwise, you are probably right about MySpace being more public in nature. There is a case out of Penn. that says teachers should not access information on confiscated phones, but I have not seen anything like that in terms of MySpace. As an educational lawyer, I advise students and others that MySpace is a public site, while there is clearly an expectation of privacy in phones.
I love the Gate! And I was pointing to that story as yet another example of people (the school in this case) misunderstanding or going completely overboard in the name of erring on the side of caution. Thanks for correcting me on this one!!
No problem. Just making sure I don’t harm Scott’s lofty Internet reputation. Glad to hear the love for the Gate. Hopefully it will be much more active soon and will be more of an everyday resource. Also glad to see your knowledge of the legal issues tied in with these tech issues. Even online, we just can’t get away from the law can we?
Thanks, Justin. Not sure how much “knowledge” I have about the legal issues, but I try to at least have some “common sense” about what is reasonable and what isn’t.
Thanks to the group at The Gate for helping us IANAL types understand the law as it relates to education.