A decent computer at home, with full access to the WWW (along with knowledgeable guidance), provides more of an education than any school in the USA now can. And it’s making homeschooling increasingly possible, since the access to excellent free materials only grows.

–MIKE–

Also, our school has found nearly all the proxy servers that our student body know about and has obviously blocked them all.

Lots of buzz about this issue. I’m tagging it censorship and education on del.icou.us. robertogreco, a reader on my own post a few days ago about a filtering debate in my own 1:1 Apple school, left a links-rich comment that I’ll quote here:

“This problem with filtering is not unique to school cultures and ultimately just creates an incentive to waste valuable time finding work-arounds. It really all boils down to trust. See
this post from Chris Anderson http://tinyurl.com/22zl5h
and this summary of his talk at the Microsoft Global CIO Summit courtesy of Ross Mayfield:
http://tinyurl.com/25ar5g
for choice quotes like these:

“Don’t make people jump through a lot of hoops, the cost of experimentation is free.

“Everything is forbidden unless it is permitted” vs. “Everything is permitted unless it is forbidden.”

“…The old idea of IT determining what is appropriate prevents experimentation at the edges…The terrifying conclusion to all this is that we may have to trust our employees.

“Thanks to David Smith for pointing me to them:
http://tinyurl.com/yrpyoj“

The number of stupid rules and policies I’ve experienced could fill a coffee table book.

Here is an article I wrote on the subject in 2002, entitled “Why Teachers Don’t Use Computers.”

http://www2.districtadministration.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=884

BTW: Does anyone agree with me that this is a labor issue?

Danny, I think this is a cultural phenomenon which involves IT but also involves school administrations. In the business world as well as (sadly) the education world, many IT departments measure success by minimizing trouble tickets. (Sylvia Martinez pointed this out at TCEA last year.) By conservatively filtering and censoring Internet access, I think many IT departments reasonably believe they are contributing to measurable success by minimizing complaints and trouble ticket calls from parents, teachers, and others. Same thing goes for administrators. Leaders of bureaucracies (large and small) often tend to be reactive to “squeaky wheel complainers.” So I think part of the answer to your question is cultural, which is why this is a pervasive issue and difficult to address.

I’ve written on the issue you address, questioning whether or not IT departments are serving their constituents or serving themselves, previously in 1999 in the article “Wagging the Dog in Educational Technology: Elevating ‘IT’ Into the Classroom.” I was a fourth grade classroom teacher at the time I wrote that, it was NOT well received by my local school district administration (including the superintendent.) This is an important issue to consider. In the classroom as well as the IT department, it is easy to do what is CONVENIENT rather than what is best for students or teachers. (Darren Draper told me that quotation last summer at NECC, I think his Tech Director displays that saying prominently in his office.)

In addition to wanting to minimize complaints and trouble tickets, I think schools have fundamental problems with the basic characteristics of the read/write web. This is further exemplified for me today by the fact that I cannot search Google for the word “blog” on the school network where I’m working this morning.

The idea that students could write their own ideas, publish their voice, to the Internet is inherently disruptive and perceived as threatening by traditional school authorities in many ways. Citizen journalists in countries without democratically elected governments (China, Burma, etc) are seen as threats as well.

I agree with your point that IT departments should serve their constituents and meet their needs. Often this comes down to issues of leadership. What is the school district’s superintendent and school board’s vision of education, teaching and learning? Do they understand the importance of helping students learn to safety socially network online, publish their ideas, etc? This issue is multifaceted for sure, and I don’t have all the answers. I am certainly on a quest for ways to constructively address these dynamics in schools, however.

My grad degree is in marketing and one thing that was always drilled into us was to know your customer. The IT folks exist to serve (and support) the instruction in the classroom. I don’t teach K-12, but my wife does, ergo I can’t speak from first person experiences: but it would seem that the larger problem here might be who exists to serve who?
-D

I think we should have a contest to see who has the most inane page come up when a site it blocked. Our’s includes a smiling stop sign waving at me.

If ISTE won’t protect its members from networking practices created by paraprofessional control freaks, then the NEA and AFT should do so. Treating professional educators like imbeciles or felons is unacceptable, is wreaking havoc on the educational process and is a serious issue of working conditions. (Can you imagine a job action over Internet filtering?)

The problem Wes describes and thousands of educators experience ever day not only wastes money and cheats kids, but represents a failure of leadership from the national organizations down to the school site principal. Do the network support personnel work for the teachers or do the teachers work for them? This power grab is unprecedented and must be stopped.

It is often my experience that the computers work better right out of the box, and have more functionality, than after the IT Department gets done “fixing” them. In this case, configuration is much closer in spirit to neutering.

If your job is made more difficult by insane networking policies, speak up, attend board meetings, write letters to the editor, ask Don Knezek to speak on your behalf and don’t pretend in front of your students that the crippled net in school represents the world.

I never expect to get online in a school, but I have an enormous bag of tricks containing constructive ways to use computers without being online. The kids can get online in more rational places, like car washes and Starbucks if need be.