Wired for distraction

There is a very good feature article in the New York Times title Wired for Distraction that reasonably - without hysteria, outlines problems some students are experiencing in balancing their online lives. It describes how some students are almost obsessed with maintaining frequent contacts with friends via Twitter and Facebook or games to the point that they cannot focus on other tasks that are not so immediately fulfilling. Unlike many popular press articles on this topic, they point out that this only affects a minority of young people, but is nevertheless a significant issue. For those involved with secondary students in particular, it is a good read.

The answer, it seems, is that teachers (and parents) need to help students find balance and manage their priorities. Surprise! Who would have thunk it?

Google Apps in education: widespread, simple, powerful, cheap

Some indications of the take-up of Google Apps and other cloud computing services in education.

• "10 million Apps users in education" Oct 2010 [source]
• "New York City, today [1/11/10] announced that it's moving to "Google Apps for Education," providing cloud-based email and collaboration tools to the entire university community. This announcement comes just weeks after New York State created an initiative to bring Google Apps for Education to their K-12 schools. With students and faculty across New York now using Google Apps, it looks like the Empire State has fully embraced the cloud." [Source]
• In Australia, a struggle is underway for university cloud computing between Microsoft's Live@edu and Gmail. Many universities have switched, with Live@edu ahead at this stage. Gmail has 1.5 million student users in NSW DET schools. [source]
  

Universities and schools are finding that the predictions in the Horizon Report that 2010 - 11 is the time when 'cloud' computing will have a major impact, is being borne out. One factor is cost. Another is that the cloud systems come with lots of very appealing ancillary tools, like the ability to collaboratively edit files from any location.

The occasional voices of paranoia that used to be heard are being overtaken by a more realistic perspective. The fear that the FBI can monitor email under the US Patriot Act is one of these. Why schools should fear this is not clear to me. Australian intelligence agencies have similar powers, as they do over intercepting mail or tapping phones. Universities which deal with serious issues of intellectual property and research have apparently been satisfied that their data is appropriately secure. Why a police agency would target student online projects or the staff meeting minutes escapes me.

Real threats to student and staff security are much closer to home. The most real threats are much more mundane: careless forwarding of private information, insecure passwords, contacting strangers and bullying.

One-to-one backup salvation

A number of schools that are providing Apple notebooks for individual students are using automatic backups to make radical changes to how they manage one-to-one computing.

The students are provided with a backup hard drive that stays at home. They are required to use the Time Machine software to automatically backup the entire computer on a regular basis - possibly daily. Time Machine saves everything - settings, files, profiles etc. The Time Machine name comes from the fact that the hard drive saves each backup in series until it runs out of space. So a typical student may have 5 or 10 or more backups according to date. So if a computer is having problems, is lost or damaged, it (or a replacement) can be connected to Time Machine and restore to the latest or whichever backup version is desired. (If the problem appears to be caused by some new software, for example, go back to the backup prior to the software being installed). Everything is re-installed, so the only cost to the student is the hour or so that the restoration takes. There are backup systems available for PCs, so this is not just an Apple opportunity. The major issue here for a school is not technical but attitudinal.

The implications are very significant.

Maintenance: technical support demands can be reduced. Rather than tech staff needing to spend long hours trying to detect a claimed fault in a computer, the student can simply be advised to restore the problem computer from the backup. The storage and backup responsibilities of the school are greatly reduced.

Student Responsibility: The system places the student firmly in control of their own computer, just as they are currently responsible for their own paper based aids. This is highly desirable if students are to become responsible student and adult computer users. An important implication of this system is that students must have administration rights to their computer. Some schools find this threatening. Others, who have tried it, do not, because they prefer to deal with misbehaving students individually rather than constrain and limit what all students can to. A major benefit of this open approach is that a significant number of students will explore new software and potential of their computer, and pass this knowledge back to the school for the benefit of all. Parents who understand the procedures and responsibilities are generally very supportive.

The savings in unnecessary school computer administration are very significant.

Ethics of a Walled Garden

The concept of a walled garden has been in use for some time to describe an approach to school access to the wider world, and the internet in particular. A school with a walled garden approach to internet access only allows students to explore a limited part of the internet that is deemed to be safe and of educational value to students. The term is mainly used in a derisory manner by ICT in education people to describe over-restricted student systems that provide teachers and students with a severely truncated version of the internet.

For young children we have always provided a highly protected learning environment as they start to gain skills and understandings about the big wide world. By the senior years we are used to the idea that they read adult literature and explore sophisticated and sometimes quite dark ideas - like some of the themes in Shakespeare. Throughout my career there has always been some tension between the notion of providing children in the middle years with an enclosed school environment - a walled garden - or engaging them more with the world. The internet has brought this tension to the foreground because it opens a great big window into the world from any computer, making it difficult to isolate the school from the wider world. Children can have more choices where they play and explore.

At home, most students have quite open access to the internet. I think this creates a real ethical dilemma for administrators and teachers. In who's interests is a walled garden approach to the internet? If their school's internet is a highly restricted walled garden then children will certainly be attracted to the lively forest over the wall.

Education departments and administrators justify the maintenance of very restricted internet access for students on the grounds that internet access including collaborative activities can lead to privacy risks, bullying and access to damaging material. This is said in full awareness of the fact that outside the school, children may well face all these risks with little protection. Experts in child safety are unanimous that the best protection against the risks mentioned above is child awareness and skills development. This can be done best by schools working in cooperation with parents. It seems to me that ethically, teachers should be focusing on what is best for the student and this is not served well by restricting the learning that can best occur in a classroom. If schools engage their students with sensible use of the internet this learning will help children in their home use of the internet. School administrators who support a highly restricted school environment often cite parent complain or litigation as risks. This is a hint that their actions may be more self-serving than being in the interests of their students. Students who are engaged in wide-ranging internet access will learn discrimination skills and selectivity. Students engaged in school social networking for learning will learn about managing their privacy and online safety measures. They will learn skills that help them in their online life at home.

For a school to largely withdraw their students from engagement with the internet and some of its potential risks is to my mind ethically questionable when we know that a large majority of students from at least age 12 and beyond are actively engaged in this world out of school. Educators cannot use the argument that this is not the school's role because the internet is a dominant and growing medium in our society and in education.

Parents are likely to be very supportive of initiatives in this area. The boundaries of appropriate behaviour are not firm and teachers are well placed to help their students think through what is appropriate. The level of engagement with the internet I am supporting for middle years students includes password protected collaborative sites, engagement with peers and lightly filtered but monitored internet access: a walled garden but with a low wall.




Image http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Walled_garden_-_geograph.org.uk_-_273916.jpg

Names, children, internet identity and common sense

Last year in a workshop on Web 2.0 applications we got into discussion about children's personal information and privacy and safety. Some teachers showed a deep-seated fear of children's identities being discovered on the internet and dreadful but unspecfied consequences occuring as a result. Obviously it is a good idea to be sensibly discrete about personal information, especially if you are young and not having developed the the set of sensible caution-antennae that is called adulthood. But after the workshop I called in at a local roasted chicken establishment, as one does, and waiting in front of me was a girl about 12 wearing a pullover with the names of all the year 6, 7s and 8s in her school on the back. So I can now tell you that Hazel McIntyre is in year 7 at St xxx School. Apparently there is something about internet personal information that is much more dangerous than old-media personal information. I can read in the local free newspaper that Lucy Liu is goalkeeper of the school netball team, just below her photograph. The unthinking fear about exposing any child information on the internet needs to balanced against the way we routinely use similar information in the public arena without any apparent harm. Teachers need to be engaged with Web 2.0 tools on the internet so they can understand from their own involvement how to manage privacy and openness in a sensibe ways.

Children, sex and safety on the internet

There was an excellent program on Australia’s Radio National recently titled Sex on the Net about child safety. In the style of this program it is a very sensible and thoughtful perspective and in 45 minutes goes into considerable depth. The link allows you to listen or download the audio and there is a transcript.

In short, the program says: there are serious issues at stake, there is no need to panic and the issues are complex. As usual, there are no simple answers and there is a lovely section in the program where a man who has been working for years in an educational program for children with one message - don’t give out your personal details, who realises that it is probably a useless approach.

It is a topic that school administrators and teachers need to know a lot about, and many of the ‘expert’ on this program said that they don’t really know what is happening.