CONTROL IS AN ABSOLUTE GOOD
Source: http://schools.webster.k12.mo.us/images/ace/3666/ace\_653240523\_1194388707.jpg
Over at The Edge of Tomorrow, these two issues are raised in Ben Grey’s Technology Guidelines. I’ve encountered them both before and argued both perspectives on at least one of them before. Here they are one at a time with my responses underneath…
The statement was made that all of the data being produced by teachers and students should be housed within a district. One specific example given was that you shouldn’t allow teachers to use a site like Wikispaces as legally, a district can’t control the data, and thus can’t shut it down should teachers or students do or say something inappropriate. Same thing for blogs, podcasts, or any other data produced by students.
In favor of this statement: School districts and their leaderships are ultimately responsible. While it’s all well and good to argue that new Web 2.0 technologies empower individuals to publish at will in ways that we couldn’t have imagined years ago, it’s important to remember that we, as educators, serve as “guardians” of what the Community holds to be safe, respectable. If teachers and students engage in inappropriate behavior—that is, behavior that is considered to be in opposition to the general values held by the culture of a school district—then the school must exercise it’s authority. Such behavior violates the culture of the school and sets up a distraction from the primary mission—transmission of what has generally been agreed upon as “education” for students, codified in the state curriculum guides, and measured in state assessments.
The primary mission of the school IS NOT to empower individuals to flaunt the social mores of the society it seeks to prepare children for. Rather, it is simply to facilitate student learning that prepares them for success in such a society. Web 2.0 tools—by their nature, transitory and disruptive because they grant anyone, even children who may lack the understanding to properly use the tools—should be banned and blocked in K-12 in varying degrees. Web 2.0 may introduce topics for discussion that are best left to parents to discuss and are irrelevant to education as we know it.
If change in these societal structures and educational institutions is sought, then it must be done through agreed upon methods…by engaging the academic community in learning conversations that are made manifest through school board conversations.
Teachers and students who circumvent the rules agreed upon by the school board should face disciplinary action or censure.
Against this statement: Technology has accelerated the rate of change, and the ability of each of us to collaborate. Schools, due to their adherence on textbooks and curriculum guides, move too slowly to keep up. Furthermore, there is no way that Technology Departments in school districts can keep up with venture capitalist funded businesses which are deploying online, enabling educators and students incredible access to a wealth of online tools. While Wikispaces may reign supreme as the one company that has embraced Education with limited hope of renumeration, there is a long list of companies that have embraced with the specific hope of making money off educators unafraid to “go off the reservation” (our public schools).
Since the reality is that privacy is an illusion, that our data must find its way into as many places as possible so that we can ensure that OUR perception of what is endures in the face of multimedia messages that may contradict, then students and teachers must not waste time. They both must embrace every tool that helps them accomplish academic and social goals, enabling them to communicate and collaborate at a distance with the understanding that no one tool is permanent, no one tool will endure long. This lack of permanence would once have been abnormal, but is now, normal.
Wikispaces, PBWiki, Blogger, GabCast, Podomatic, MySpace,Facebook, all are online spaces that educators must seek to embrace and use to share their message. If they fail to do so, the message that is projected will be focused the financial benefit of the companies themselves, rather than centered on the uses that are educational and aligned to academic purposes.
Educators—and their students—are the strongest user-base out there. Not only do we have a right to make each new technology a teachable moment, we have an obligation to ensure that our message of sharing learning, ideas, permeates the virtual space we enter.
The second issue…
2. A teacher should never allow a student’s work to be posted if it isn’t entirely free of grammatical or spelling errors. Their work should be perfect before being shared with the public. It would be embarrassing to a student, their family and the district if someone else saw their work that had obvious errors in it.
On this topic, it is so obvious that this perspective is inadequate, I’m shocked to encounter it. At times like this, I pull out my copy of Lucy Calkins’ The Art of Teaching Writing, and share the section about editing student writing. Rather than quote that section (page 304, BTW), I’ll share this story:
A 2nd grade teacher, Peter, embraced blogging for his classroom of writers. The students were engaged and enthused about writing online. At first, however, Peter felt the need to correct student’s invented spelling errors online. When students would go back to read their writing, they found that they did not recognize their pieces. “Sir, where is what I wrote yesterday?” This editing also placed a tremendous strain on Peter. He felt embarrassed when other teachers read students’ writing and found errors.
My advice to Peter was to focus on spelling errors as part of the editing process, encouraging students to make lists of corrected words in their writing journals. Then, empower students to treat their writing when published on the blog as a published piece that should be as perfect as possible. We knew they would get feedback on that writing, but if students had done their best editing the work, then the feedback they received—positive or negative—was their’s to own.
Over time, Peter has allowed his students to take more ownership for editing and correcting what they write, keeping their blog posts in draft until the time they are feel they are ready to share.
A quick aside: Now, I have a different perspective about blogging than I do about writing for publication and using the blog as the way to publish writing online, where online publishing is an equivalent to publishing in a print magazine.
So, the real issue in both of these questions is about control. Is complete control over what human beings do an absolute good? No. That’s why we fight for freedom and desire free will.
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