Wassup?
Attention tends to focus on issues related to specific content, such as child protection or copyright compliance. Filtering technology offers hope of partially mitigating these and reducing legal liability, but at the cost of a richer learning experience. More important, I think, are the values promoted by the processes used to negotiate the filtering rules.
1. Respect
Chris Betcher writes a compelling plea for schools to think in terms of trust and respect for students, when planning internet filters and digital communication rules.
2. Cohesion
A ‘learning organisation‘ seeks to share the task of learning and improvement. This communal openness can be poisoned by too-obvious differences in permissions. Nonetheless, students (and staff) are at different stages of cognitive, moral and social readiness, and it is unfair to expect all kids to deal with the material that is challenging to the most adventurous. (Child protection considerations intrude, here.) Group definition is also involved: The functioning of a class as a team, or the school as a community, can be impeded by individuals’ preoccupation with people outside invisibly connected cliques inside the walls.
3. Equity
School kids are developing their sense of equity. Schools often set sadly simplistic rules to cut short perennial debates about fairness. For example, access may be restricted in order to preempt attempts to innovate for personal advantage, or to compensate for students’ unequal resources, or to apply a keenly-felt but cost-free punishment to troublesome students.
4. Trade-offs
Student-initiated communication has an opportunity cost which students must learn to manage – unless the school does it for them. For example, schools commonly ban devices from classrooms in order to privilege the teacher-to-student channel, and parents ask boarding schools to block social web sites so that their children will not be distracted from homework.
Outlook
This is where the Digital Education Revolution is heading:
Students undertake challenging and stimulating learning activities supported by access to global information resources and powerful tools for information processing, communication and collaboration;… AICTEC Advice, p6
Along this journey, schools will be challenged to support or suppress students’ desires for freedom and responsibility, inclusion, equity and efficacy. Internet filtering policy in schools could become a hotly contested, and marketable, differentiating characteristic of schools.
References
AICTEC 2009. Digital Education Revolution Implementation Roadmap. Advice to the Productivity Agenda Working Group Schooling Sub-group from the Australian Information and Communications Technology in Education Committee. [http://www.deewr.gov.au/Schooling/DigitalEducationRevolution/Documents/AICTEC_DER_ROADMAPAdvice.pdf accessed 20/02/2010]
Betcher, C. 2010. A policy of trust and respect. ChrisBetcher.com. [http://chrisbetcher.com/2010/02/a-policy-of-trust-and-respect accessed 20/02/2010]
Smith, M. K. (2001) ‘Peter Senge and the learning organization’, the encyclopedia of informal education. [www.infed.org/thinkers/senge.htm. Last update: September 03, 2009]
Image from Covenant Promotions (no date) CovPro Filtered Internet service. [http://www.pornblocker.com/s4f/ accessed 20/02/2010]
Suitability:
