Should school uniformity limit a student’s device features?

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Posted on 6th September 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Mobiles | Next | Schools we now have

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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.

One Web has won and that makes all the difference

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Posted on 21st April 2010 by Judy Breck in Findability | Mobiles | Next | Schools we now have

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One Web has won out over proprietary content, content in walled gardens, and other efforts to partition off content to sell it or control it. That victory was not won by copyright dismantling, the generosity of those who would share, or any other human intervention. One Web has won because network laws are far more powerful than any of these human machinations.

In simple terms, here is what network laws do: When you put a node of human knowledge into the internet, that node will link up with cognitively related nodes, forming a pattern from which whole ideas emerge that are more than the sum of the parts. Nothing locked away from this ability to interconnect will stay as authentic and fresh as the sum of the parts emerging by obeying network laws. This is, of course, the concept at the core of Google where, to understate the obvious, the results are huge.

Back in the old days of wired computers, when educators went down the road of school control of the internet, it was highly questionable whether One Web would win. A student had to go to a brick-and-wired place, in a building to a computer lab or school library, to connect online. For profit companies captured and created digital resources and sold them to schools which, in turn, doled them out to students following curricula a standards outlines. As an example, ProQuest today continues to sell the contents of its walled garden over and over, to 35,000 K-12 schools and hundreds of colleges and universities. Networking of ideas in the content and users is blocked in proprietary content of this sort — letting the content lose its freshness, precluding patterns, and not allowing interaction among users at different schools. The controlling choice by educators was made instead of engaging network knowledge, and that is this making all the difference.

A few years ago it was a close call. One Web for learning could have stayed lost in the pretenses that online learning managed by the education and publishing priesthoods were taking advantage of the learning opportunities of the internet. As money runs out for public education, another factor will speed One Web — the fact that it is almost free. Not so proprietary resources that cost education huge amounts of money every year.

DEFINITION OF ONE WEB – Here is what they say about One Web at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Web standards group headed by the inventor of the Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee:

The social value of the Web is that it enables human communication, commerce, and opportunities to share knowledge. One of W3C’s primary goals is to make these benefits available to all people, whatever their hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability. One Web means making, as far as is reasonable, the same information and services available to users irrespective of the device they are using.

WHY ONE WEB IS WINNING – The short answer is because handschooling is now possible: the One Web can be delivered on mobile devices which are, by definition, individual and in control of the learner. The control by schools is gone; individuals can connect to the internet directly. And the proof of the winning of One Web is in the provider pudding: mobile providers are putting internet browsing on essentially all of their devices.

Little has been written and said regarding the fact that with laptops, smartphones, iPhone and iPod Touch, and now iPads and other tablets, “the same information and services [are] available to users” because they ALL browse the internet. Sure, there are apps that are in walled gardens for some mobiles. Even the fusty vendor of education resources ProQuest is working to get a system set up selling its products on mobile.

The bottom line, however, is that the demand and efficacy of networking is obvious in the fact that browsing the internet is included across the board for mobiles.

ONE WEB CONNECTS ALL INDIVIDUALS TO THE SAME LEARNING RESOURCES FORMED BY NETWORK LAWS – No matter how hard the education establishment tries to look down its very long nose at Wikipedia, that remarkable free encyclopedia proves the power of the open network to gather, evaluate, and present knowledge. But there are now thousands of knowledge abundant websites that no educator could demean and remain credible. A couple of examples of what the winning One Web offers — and what make it obvious why One Web was the right road to take. The PoetryFoundation.org is a network interrelating poets and poetry, where this morning I listened to the voice of Robert Frost reading five of his poems in 1959. Precise, super-authentic science that is up-to-the-moment is found, for example, at ScienceBlogs like the very topical one today on volcanoes called Eruptions.