Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

Addressing perceptions of online anonymity

I posted the following thoughts to the Yahoo Web and Education discussion group today, addressing another educator’s concern over the purchase of Flickr by Yahoo and the likelihood that an ever increasing number of valuable Internet services will be blocked in school districts by liability myopic administrators.

—– post follows —–

I think you are absolutely right to be concerned, Mark, and I am too. I think we are going about this entire process from the wrong perspective. There are certainly some things we should continue to block student access from at school (porn sites, for example) but many more sites fit into a nebulous “grey area” that I think administrators find easier to conservatively block rather than deal with the issues which may ensue as a result of student access to these places.

When all students and teachers have laptops (I really think this vision of 1:1 computing isn’t too far off, much closer than most people realize) then the issues will become even more acute. That is why I think we need a change in perspective. Our focus should be more on individual accountability of students and teachers for what they do online, rather than just trying to block everything– because the latter is certainly a losing battle, with high incidental casualties in many areas.

One way to respond to this is through higher levels of IT control, but I don’t think that is ultimately the answer. Educating students, parents, teachers and administrators must be a big part of the solution. But individual accountability has to be built-in as well. If a student goes somewhere on the Internet using a school computer, there should be some digital accountability for where the student goes and what he/she does there. Our systems can provide this. I was just exchanging emails last week with a teacher who was lamenting the huge numbers of passwords students have to keep track of. It seems that schools should use a single sign-on system that is platform independent and standards compliant, and insist that vendors who sell to the district provide a mechanism for their product to interface with the system. If students have laptops, rather than focus all the attention on filtering, more attention should be focused on what students are doing and not doing with their laptops. And there should be a way for every website the student visits (or whoever is using the laptop) to be logged to a server-based file linked to that student’s name.

Addressing the perception of online anonymity is something I don’t hear people talking about much today. We live in a world where our abilities to protect students from outside influences are shrinking. That doesn’t mean we should shut off all access to the Internet, or block everything except the discovery channel. It does mean we should get serious about educating all the constituents involved in working with students, and also get creative in the ways we try to encourage a culture where individual accountability is the norm rather than the exception.

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On this day..


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