Moving at the Speed of Creativity

Lots of VERY interesting stories in the last couple of days at the COSN/Texas CTO Council conference in Dallas, Texas, regarding situations where IT departments are catching school employees as well as students going inappropriate places on school networks using tools like Lightspeed and others.

Tonight, I learned about (via Miguel) a new software program that all school IT departments are likely going to want to block and prohibit, because it is designed specifically to circumvent and defeat Internet traffic tracking software like Lightspeed. The software is Tor, and it is available for free from EFF. According to the Tor website:

Tor is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people that want to improve their safety and security on the Internet. Using Tor can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and other applications that use the TCP protocol. Tor also provides a platform on which software developers can build new applications with built-in anonymity, safety, and privacy features.

Could Tor be used creatively, effectively, and appropriately by teachers in school contexts? Absolutely. If it works as advertised, I could use it on any school network during a professional development workshop to show MySpace websites (probably not a great idea because of the ads alone, however) or other sites that are normally blocked by the content filter. (In some districts that even block webpages mentioning MySpace, blocked sites could even include my own blog.)

What are school district IT people going to do about this? I don’t know. Take away all hopes of teacher administrative access to their classroom computers or school laptops? Maybe. But what about teachers or students who bring their own laptops to school? Will IT devise a way to defeat Tor? The race is on, and it’s sure to be interesting.

The real problem here is that we’re not talking about a game, we’re talking about the need to prepare students for making good decisions in real life. I think real accountability is very important in a variety of contexts, and perceptions of accountability are essential for helping students live in a culture of appropriate behavior inside and outside of school. Sadly, no one at CoSN Texas this week (that I heard at least) seemed to be talking about this side of the debate. We needed a keynote or at least a spotlight session on this issue.

Am I going to install Tor on my personal laptop? Yep. Already did. Will I use it during teacher professional development? Most likely. The issues of control and creativity that I’ve been discussing in my latest podcast series are vitally important. We need to be having conversations about these with a wide variety of people, and not just accepting the latest decision of the IT department to block a particular technology (like IM) or a particular website (like this blog, for instance) as a good, ethical, or instructionally appropriate decision.

Am I fomenting educational revolution here? You bet I am.

On this day..

• Podcast260: EduBloggerCon 2008, Intellectual Property and Recording: A Conversation with Elaine Roberts of Pearson - 2008
• links for 2008-06-29 - 2008
• iPhones are here! - 2007
• Humility in the face of dynamical and chaotic forces - 2007
• Thoughts on school reform - 2006
• Visitors in the last 2 weeks - 2006
• Tune in to the Shuttle launch! - 2006

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 29th, 2006 at 12:01 am and is filed under disruptive-technology, isafety, web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.