What is needed to be a Digital Citizen?

Ah! Its Saturday night, I’m sitting back, with an Iced Tea, watching Silverchair and Powderfinger on the Telly. I pick up my Laptop and open Vienna to catch up with my blog-roll. After reading Will Richardson’s blog “the kids are alright” I was lead to read Alec Couros’ “Understanding Digital Citizenship.” Hmm. Alec really starts the thought processes going, and Will has some very good additions too.

Below are the ongoing thoughts that I’ve had after mulling on this for a little while. It starts off as the comment I made to Alec’s article, then continues on from there.

This is a very important subject, and one that we as educators need to look good and hard at. I will be posting some thoughts to this on my blog, once I have digested what you’ve said and the thoughts that spawn from this (herewith). There’s so much that can be said, but in the end, we want our students to learn the appropriate way to use the Internet. The way that keeps them safe, aware, informed. The Internet is a great tool, Web 2.0 allows interaction like never before, and hey, not all of it is bad! How do we as Educators use this when the current trend is to stick a filter in front of it so that it can’t be seen, and therefore doesn’t exist in what we teach? I know some teachers that are banging their heads against brick walls trying to get to use some of these fantastic new tools. It’s my dream that we can work out a compromise on this. I’d like to know the answer to this problem. But alas, will there ever be a definitive one?

As the Internet, and the new technologies grow, I bet these sorts of problems will too. But in saying that, ignoring them doesn’t help either. We have a wish list of things that we would like to be able to do with our students in 2008, and how we are going to do some of them seem like a “far away” thing. What reaction would you get when you ask for a class set of Mobile Phones so you can teach the students to twitter? In reality most of the students (if not all) will have them already, but they are not meant to have them at school so we cant encourage that!

What are your thoughts on this? Do we draw a line, put in a filter, or do we open up the world?

So, for 2008

The time has come to look to 2008 and what we would like to achieve. We have already done the Hardware Audit and know what we are purchasing for 2008. We will end up with 220 Desktops, 56 School owned Laptops, and probably 50 -100 students with laptops. I cant see any changes to the current filtering protocols, and I would like for us to do some “trials” with a group of students. I sent the following to twisted for her to dwell upon.Ok, so I’ve been thinking (which has often proved to be very dangerous) and if you want to present at ELH 2008 on “TFT” we could approach it in the following way.

1. Create a wish list of what you’d like to be able to use (blog’s, twitter, etc.) and what you’d like to achieve with them.
2. I will then investigate and create (as best we can) these for you to use.
   • This may be hosted locally or remotely depending on how we go.
   • This may need a certain class/classes to be set up with different filtering options (I’ll explain how we can do this at some stage) which may need a submission to the powers that be and parental acceptance etc.
3. Teach to your hearts content using these new options and glean (isn’t that a silly word) as much info on the pro’s and con’s of what you’ve found in doing this.
4. We then do 2 presentations, to both teachers and techs, about what we wanted to achieve and how we achieved it by being united in what we wanted to do.

Just my early thoughts…… Lets see what we can do with this. If we can get LG with 2 classes in the same area we could use the original methods with 1 and the new and improved with the other. Though using this as a comparison may not be suitable depending on where they are to start with, but you’d get to see how students respond to the newer approach.Let me know what you think about this? Are there any issues I’m not covering here. Cheers,TFT.

This is IT

Well tomorrow is the first discussion at the committee level about our “filtering.” I’m sure that it will be a “vigorous” discussion from some sides, but at least its a start.

I read a great post by Alex Miller on another blocked site? feeling stifled? what can you do? and it was great to read the comments and see the support that is being built up around the globe on this topic.

Lets hope we can inject some of that enthusiasm into our upcoming discussions. Stay tuned, more on this to follow I’m sure.

Filtering – How much, and what?

I finally got around to posting a comment to a post by Adrian Greig on the Expanding Learning Horizons and SchoolTech 2007 group on facebook and thought I’d share my thoughts here as well. I’m not sure of the general availability of this post so I’ll repeat some of it here.

Adrian asked the following:

Web filtering on the internet…there are risks but great benefits?
What is the best solution/answer. Completely open? Filter heavily? Or some balance?
Who should choose?
How to decide what gets filtered?
My state system has major filtering in place much to the great ire of many teachers as they want to use Youtube, etc.
How much do you filter?
How do you deal with problems?

This is an issue that I have been thinking a lot about lately. I am being made increasingly aware of the frustration caused to teachers when the lesson they have planned won’t work because of blocked sites.

My response to Adrian was:

I work for a Multi-Campus Independent K-12 College on the NSW Hunter Coast as the Sys Admin for one of those campuses. We have implemented a central filtering appliance at our ISP so that all of our Campuses (5) go through the same filter. Any requests to have a site unblocked have to go through our Main Campus.

I have seen first hand the struggle our teachers have with this, and I too have my hands tied as I can’t assist them.

Since ELH, Lisa-Gaye and I have discussed filtering and if it is too heavy. As stated earlier we have a “duty of care” to our students, but does that mean “filter anything and everything that may pose a real or implied threat” or does it mean “filter as much of the nasty’s that you can, but leave the middle grey areas open and teach about the dangers”? I have seen our senior students give up on using the Internet for research as, in their words, “we cant get to anything so why bother trying”

It’s interesting that when searching I have found documents put out by the Education Departments in Vic, Tas, and SA all to do with the “duty of care” as it applies to the Internet, but nothing from NSW where we are based.

I’d like to do some research… pick a couple of classes (get parental permission), reduce the filtering, monitor their use (for pastoral care follow up as required), and see how their work standard, and attitude improve. Could be interesting I think.

What do you think about the whole filtering issue? I’d like some feedback on this to take to our ICT Committee when we try and push for change.

Fade to Grey

So, where do we begin? There were 7 of us at ELH2007 last week, and for most of us, there were huge plans, big dreams and the biggest of visions of what we would like to do. The worst thing would be to loose all of this.

This week I hope to get together with those of our Executive that attended. Our HOJS, HOSS, and ICT Learning Co-Ordinator K-12, and have a look at what they each want to do. I can see a brainstorming session coming on. The biggest issue will be timeframe. Obviously this is not going to happen overnight, but we need to start planning to make it happen. In the meantime the Teachers that were there have come away with great ideas and new ways to do things.

We will also need to look at Policy. What is currently in place is very restrictive. The sad part is that I wrote it. The happy part is that I’m open to change it. This I believe will be the first step. I can now see that the uses of ICT in Education are not something that can be controlled by Black and White Policy. We need to get to the point where we are flexible. At some point in time, some of that policy will need to fade to grey.