Posted on 14th November 2010 by Judy Breck in Mobiles | Schools we now have
censorship, trust
My last post dreams of something unrealistic. It is not possible for the largest school system to lead into the future of learning. I got carried away with too much hope when I wrote the post. Yesterday I came back down to earth by reading some of the regulations of the New York City Department of Education, which controls the public schools for the city.
The NYC Department of Education Internet Acceptable Use Policy is a fundamental roadblock to student use of the knowledge power of the Internet. The document is a quintessential example of government education necessarily strangled in its own regulations. Its bottom line is that students in the system can only peek now and then at learning resources online that are pre-approved by their teacher.
There is no winnable retort to government schools for people like me who want to release students to explore the online knowledge networks. The Department of Education will be sued if one kid uses its system to look at pornography. Tragedy can occurred if kids use the Department’s system to meet dangerous strangers online. The Department of Education cannot offer trust to its mass of students, and most certainly does not trust them as the lengthy regulations make clear.
And so the paradox: The best knowledge is now online and the New York City public schools will connect its students to that knowledge in only the most limited way.
The solution to this paradox has been taking form for years, and is about to cascade across the world. Privileged kids have had their own laptop for a long time. Increasingly, kids have smart phones and wireless tablets by which they can browse the internet. As wireless access rapidly spreads and the wireless devices flood the market, the young generation will individually have personal access to the best knowledge. Whether they wander into porn is not their school’s problem.
The approaching crunch for government schools is how to deal with the individual access to the internet owned by a student. In the New York City public schools have not budged:
CELL PHONES AND ALL OTHER ELECTRONIC DEVICES ARE NOT PERMITTED IN SCHOOL.
— ALL cell phone, iPods or other electronic devices will be confiscated
— Cell phones, iPods, and ALL other electronic devices will only be returned to parents on the third TUESDAY of every month at our PTA/PC workshop between the hours of 6:00 P.M. – 8:00 P.M. in the school’s auditorium
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Posted on 25th October 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Mobiles | Schools we now have
censorship, Iran, web_browser
It is fascinating to watch educators who blithely ignore the emergence of individual control of learning as it is empowered by mobile devices. In the report below from Associated Press, religious leaders in Iran have imposed restrictions on teaching by revising course content and eliminating courses at universities. The boy in the picture above is connecting to websites of his own choosing from anywhere on earth.
So far, the fact that they do not all have mobiles that browse the web is the major reason every kid on earth is not yet accessing knowledge the way the boy is. That is changing fast. Governments, such as China, also still have some capacity to block and censor the web.
Over the next few years, which do you think will choose what a student learns: 1. The mobile-owning student with individual direct access to open knowledge online? OR 2. The educators who shape the curricula at universities and attempt to block internet content they disapprove? Iranian Abolfazl Hassani apparently thinks it will be the educators who control what a student studies:
TEHRAN, Iran – Iran has imposed new restrictions on 12 university social sciences deemed to be based on Western schools of thought and therefore incompatible with Islamic teachings, state radio reported Sunday.
The list includes law, philosophy, management, psychology, political science and the two subjects that appear to cause the most concern among Iran’s conservative leadership — women’s studies and human rights.
“The content of the current courses in the 12 subjects is not in harmony with religious fundamentals and they are based on Western schools of thought,” senior education official Abolfazl Hassani told state radio.
Hassani said the restrictions prevent universities from opening new departments in these subjects. The government will also revise the content of current programs by up to 70 percent over the next few years, he said.
Posted on 6th September 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Mobiles | Next | Schools we now have
censorship, one_web, open
The Naked CIO writes this week about: Apple’s iPad – why it’s iBad for business IT. The article delves into this: “No one could fault the innovation behind Apple’s iPad tablet but the fact remains that this immature technology will cause problems for the IT department . . . .”
Delving into the same issue for schools raises this question: Should the devices a student uses be limited to those the school is equipped and staffed to control? There is a range of issues. On the practical end: Should student devices be able to interface the school’s content management and other IT (if any) designed for use in instruction? At the privacy end: Should students only be allowed to use devices in school that the IT staff can monitor?
There are two separate areas to which these questions apply to schools:
1) Tech stuff that is only inside the ivy wall of the school: When it comes to the internal applications the school uses, innovative devices like the iPad may well be iBad for the reasons described by the Naked CIO.
2) Browsing the internet: Issues of censorship by schools arise when they limit or prohibit internet browsing — issues that are very different than when schools require devices that work with the instruction technology within their own walls. A key policy of Tim Berners-Lee’s W3C, which sets Web standards, is One Web: the critical standard that the devices all essentially interface the same content from the open internet. Any device that allows a student to browse the internet should be welcome in schools, and the authorities at the schools should not take it upon themselves to alter and/or block that content before their students can browse.
You may disagree with this in terms of the safety of allowing kids to have full access to the internet. That is, however, a separate issue from the wading in by educators to manage learning content from the open internet before students are allowed to access it.
These are fascinating new issues that are just beginning to come over the horizon into mainstream schooling.
