LIBERTYVILLE, Ill. – High school students are going to be held accountable for what they post on blogs and on social-networking Web sites such as MySpace.com. The board of community High School District 128 voted unanimously on Monday to require that all students participating in extracurricular activities sign a pledge agreeing that evidence of “illegal or inappropriate” behavior posted on the Internet could be grounds for disciplinary action. The rule will take effect at the start of the next school year, officials said. District officials won’t regularly search students’ sites, but will monitor them if they get a worrisome tip from another student, a parent or a community member.
Source: Daily Herald, Tuesday May 23, 2006

This was a news article shared with technology directors in Texas. My response to them is:

Tread carefully in regards to this issue. Your school district, your district and campus administrators and teachers aren’t ready to handle “blogs.” Right now, there is so much negative publicity that blog-banning is the ONLY safe route for you to take if you want to keep your job and the respect of your colleagues.

Blocking blogs is about protecting children, keeping them safe from an evil world filled with cyber-predators. The federal government, under the authoritative leadership of the President, has taken steps with No Child Left Behind to foster technology literacy, to focus funding on what’s really important, what is relevant to the future survival of our children–math, science, and assessment.

Anything that distracts educators from this purpose–preparing our children for a global race where information age jobs are handled at 25x less* the price of what it would take to do them in the United States–should be excised from schools and budgets. We have a clear mandate to set high expectations for our schools and expect them to live up to it.

Schools have been given their marching orders–Raise academic standards (e.g. high stakes testing results in punishment for schools). Protect children from the evil out there (e.g. ban what we can’t control rather than use it as a teachable moment). Endure the consequences of failure through diverted funding to charter schools (e.g. you know). Control the means of publication to prevent dissent (e.g. prevent access to MySpace and any student publishable web space because it can be used to organize immigration walk-outs, not to mention free speech.).

As I read over the last 4 paragraphs I’ve written, I’m struck by one thing. These are not my core values as an educator, or why I became an instructional technologist. My core values are as follows:

1) Share learning with as wide an audience as possible.

2) Join in on the conversation, even as a listener/lurker.

3) Share response-ability (e.g. create conditions that promote authorship).

4) Collaborate with others.

5) Ubiquitous technology access.

Web 2.0, a.k.a. Read/Write Web, are technologies that support these values in ways that we have only caught glimpses of in the past. In my “5 Steps to District Blogs,” I advise districts who want to play it safe. At http://itls.saisd.net/scribe you can see what less than half a year’s work in a pilot has accomplished. Next year, we push it out district-wide.

I encourage all of us to remember that graduating seniors were asked by a group of principals, “What is it about your high school years that you liked?” fully expecting students to remember memorable learning experiences. The memorable learning experiences took place OUTSIDE of school time.

Often, my friends, I fear that we do nothing controversial, or study social justice with our students, because we are afraid. So, like an administrator waiting for retirement, we maintain the status quo long after “the status is gone” (as Donald Reeves wrote in Educational Leadership this May 2006 issue).

So, play it safe, ban/block it all. After all, we see the Chinese are coming. They want to be like us, and, goodness help us, we want to be like them.

*As cited in Dan Pink’s book, A Whole New Mind

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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure