Last week, my creative writing students pulled out their laptops and headed over to the eStudio that I setup on ELGGSpaces (which is designed specifically with education in mind, and for which I had just spend $99 out-of-pocket to make the space ad-free.) They were going to upload some new drafts, write some blog posts reflecting on their writing process and recent reading, and leave comments for one another. When they got to the site, though, they found our county’s “blue screen of denial” waiting for them.

At that point, a mini-explosion went off in my head. It seems the county had decided to add ELGGSpaces to the block list along with nearly every other useful/interesting “Web 2.0″ site, from the obvious ones like MySpace and Facebook, to sites like Flickr, Blogger, Google Video, and even Wordpress.org (which doesn’t host the blogs themselves, just the files and documentation on the Wordpress software).

I immediately sent an email to our school’s technology specialists and to one of the technology specialists at the central administration office. Thankfully, it took only two days for the county to unblock the site, and now my students are back to working online.

This is not an attack or complaint against my county in particular. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised to see the quick turn-around on this issue. The problem is that this seems to be happening nation wide. Schools are defaulting to “block access” rather than “open access.” I’ve heard the arguments from the various concerned parties, but frankly, I’m not convinced.

By cutting students off from accessing the world of the web in schools, we are failing our students in a number of ways:

• Abdicating responsibility for student safety - If we refuse to address the social web in schools (or are blocked from being able to do so), then we leave students to explore it on their own without guidance and without a forum in which to discuss the implications of its use. Additionally, by not training students how to effectively and safely use these tools, we leave students open to an even greater chance of being victimized online. (See Pete Reilly’s post about online safety: the majority of sexual abuse, online or off, happens at home.) And please, let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that by not addressing it in school we are keeping it out of our schools.

Whether or not YouTube is being blocked, it is ON your campus in the form of miniature devices tucked away in the pockets and backpacks of your students. Cool Cat Teacher Blog: Spies Like Us

• Preventing the “free and easy exchange of ideas” - A fundamental assumption of an open democracy (or democratic republic) is that all people should have free and easy access to information and should participate in a free and easy exchange of ideas so that each person will have an equal opportunity to participate. No tool has made this more possible than the internet, and social software has extended these possibilities. Don’t we want our students to become active participants in society?
• Failing to prepare students to be fully literate citizens - It should be clear by now that digital literacy is a component of general literacy that can no longer be ignored. This will only increase over time (see “Generation M’s Surprising Struggle With Tech Literacy“).
• Treating students like prisoners rather than learners - I don’t mean to be hyperbolic, and this is more of an emotional / affective appeal, but I still feel it’s valid. The more we regulate (and over-regulate) students, their schedules, their bodies, and their access to outside information and alternative points-of-view, the more we make them feel like prisoners of the very institution that claims to want their healthy development and their successful preparation to be independent members of society. To quote Bill Strickland:

“If you build world class facilities, you will get world class students. If you build prisons, you’ll get prisoners.” (view his slide show)

On the other hand, I’m not trying merely to complain or accuse. Schools do have a legal responsibility for the safety of students and staff. What I’m calling for is a more considered approach to these issues. How can we balance safety with openness? What revisions must happen to Acceptable Use Policies to help preserve that balance once it is attained?

We cannot answer these questions or accomplish these goals if we act from a position of fear and ignorance. Undeniably, there is a price to pay for freedom, and we can never guarantee complete safety in a free society, but this is already acknolwedged in the “offline world” and must now be acknowledge in the “online world” as well. Pete Reilly says it so well it’s worth quoting and repeating often:

We can never eliminate all risk; but there are ways to maximize our students’ safety while using these incredibly powerful tools. …As educational leaders we need to be safety conscious. We need to be prudent, reasonable; but we won’t live in fear and we won’t act from fear.It is by opening doors, not closing them that we create new possibilities for our children and new futures for ourselves.

Pete Reilly : THE FACTS ABOUT ONLINE SEX ABUSE AND SCHOOLS

This reform must come first to and then from the administrative level. While it’s exciting to work with teachers and show them some of the possibilities of tools like blogs, wikis, and podcasts, those teachers will be limited in their implementation of these tools as long as the administrators remain uninformed and unsupportive. [update: for more on this, see Gary Stager's excellent article "School Network Policies Threaten Our Democracy"]

One of my personal goals now is to reach out to administrators at all levels in my county and help them understand what these tools are and what potential benefits these tools bring to education. The benefits these tools can provide far outweigh the cost of finding ways to use them safely. I have hope that we can work to find safe solutions that truly honor student success.

Related posts (auto-generated):

1. Never Anti-Safety, Always Pro-Empowerment I’ve been invited to sit in on my county’s “Internet Safety Committee,” whose purpose is to revise the Acceptable Use Policy. I hope the...
2. Levels of Safety As a few of my former posts reveal, I’m trying to find a balance between helping my students take advantage of online technologies on...
3. The Bloglines Ban Yesterday, Miguel Guhlin wrote a post about Bloglines’ new “Image Wall.” His main contention is that the images aren’t filtered, and so anyone using...
4. Working with Blackboard Presentation I delivered a presentation last night to teachers who work in a county that only allows them to use Blackboard.  Given that, I saw...
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