Never Anti-Safety, Always Pro-Empowerment

Mon, Jan 29, 2007

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 revisions will improve safety without severly restricting access, but I’m worried.

I’ve written before about some of the problems I have with denying access to (and thus preventing instruction about) the read/write web, but I’m often concerned that others will read this argument as a cavalier approach to safety at best, or a lack of genuine concern at worst. Of course I want my students to be safe. I just think that the best way to ensure safety is to educate, not to hide.

I want my students to be literate, independent citizens able to evaluate, critique, synthesize, create, and act. I feel that if I prevent them from accessing or working with much of the digital world, I will be failing them as an educator. Not failing entirely–other things are important besides digital literacy–but not serving them entirely either. After all, other things are important besides writing, but we’re not cutting writing from the curriculum.

Though current students are a “digital generation,” they are not all prepared to work effectively in a digital world. They may have an easy grasp of the “how” of many of these tools, but who will show them the “why” and teach them to use the tools to achieve all those things we claim to value? Well, it won’t be public schools if we hide from the technology.

It’s a hard argument to make, though. I understand the need for safety. I can appreciate the tremendous difficulty a school system faces in trying to provide a safe learning environment, particularly given the often not-safe society in which that learning environment must exist. I also understand the pressure coming from litigious (and genuinely concerned) parents and groups.

But at what point will schools stand up and say (about this and many other issues): parents must bear the responsibility with us, not against us? When 95% of sexual abuse is occurring at home, and 79% of that by parents, why is the public (and the media) so concerned with bashing schools and the Internet? Why aren’t we doing something about those parents!?

And, as I’ve said before, part of bearing the responsibility with parents is teaching students and parents to read effectively and safely (whether that be TV ads, movies, books, or the Internet). We simply can’t do that if we ban TV, movies, books, or the Internet, and we definitely can’t do that if the teachers themselves don’t know how.

(I’ve also said that we can guarantee the safety of our students by locking them all in cells. But at what cost? At what cost? I don’t think that approach does much to prepare them to be contributing members of a healthy society.)

A comment on the PBS “Technology & Teaching” blog about “DOPA, Jr.” expresses another fear of mine relating to this access issue:

The point is, with DOPA shutting down access to social networking sites, instances of cyberbullying will actually INcrease – because schools will not be allowed to teach appropriate web 2.0 use… [and] the real world lives of our kids will be even more divorced from their schools. – Mark Ahlness (emphasis added)TeacherSource | learning.now . Lifting the Hood on DOPA Jr. | PBS

Schools should be relevant not only to students’ present reality, but also to their potential future realities. We’ve been out of touch for a long time, and I fear it’s only going to get worse if we don’t wake up soon.

I’m thankful for educators like Vicki Davis who are taking the initiative on these issues. As you may know, she’s started a “Social Networking Acceptable Use” page on the K12wiki specifically for the purpose of building a web 2.0 version of an Acceptable Use Policy. I hope our committee will be working with Vicki and others on that wiki, or at least considering the ideas generated there.

Protecting without educating creates weakness and dependency. Denying access to resources and information creates ignorance and an imbalanced distribution of power.

As Chris Sessums has said (worth linking to again and again):

Therefore, it necessary for us, the blogging and edublogging communities, to make education and read/write technology a social/economic priority.

Christopher D. Sessums :: Weblog :: Why the future needs us: educational reform, collaboration, and social action

I hope educators new to the online world will hear the collective concern: we want safety, too! We also want informed, educated students prepared to manage their own safety and empowered to become active citizens.

So how can we work to find safe solutions that truly honor student success.?