Bud the Teacher

Lisa Williams and her website are two of the reasons why we’re trying our own attempt at hyperlocal journalism.  Over at Pressthink, she wrote a great piece about why she does what she does.  There’s also a good chunk of history and process in the piece.  Enjoy.

    Miguel has written an article that formalizes some of his thinking on filtering and blogging and creating separate spaces for schools to use for creating learning networks.  My applause to him — it’s getting published in a couple of places.  In addition to being amazed by his ability to churn out a ton of good quality stuff on a regular basis,  I think he does a really fine job of laying out the issues — for the most part.
    Here’s the section I have the problem with (his text in blue, my comments in italics):

Unfortunately, most had not heard
of virtual spaces like MySpace.com. But after we discussed the
benefits, the question they had was, “Can we guarantee that
all
teachers will supervise students appropriately? Can we prevent
teachers from letting students use these resources
inappropriately?”
The answer, evident to all present, was “No.”

If you can’t trust your teachers, don’t you have a bigger problem than blogging in the classroom?  Also, you can’t prevent that all students will use their hands appropriately — should you immobilize all children when they walk in the front door?

With that
conversation in mind, and as a result of a podcast posted by Bud the
Teacher where he challenges the idea of filtering out commercial
blogging sites, I have a few questions to ask as well:

1. Do the benefits of access outweigh the dangers to
   our children?  A fair question — and one I struggle with myself.  Another one, just as important, is this:  What are the real dangers?  Not the perceived or extremely rare potential ones, but the actual, likely ones?
2. What right do we have to expose children to danger
   for educational purposes without parental consent?  We don’t.  Who’s advocating blogging without parental consent?  I require permission slips before blogging begins.  Our district also has an AUP in place. 
3. Do parents—who may be technology
   illiterate—truly understand the dangers their children face
   when they are turned loose on home computers?  Another really good question — but the same question can be asked of parents and literature that they haven’t read that we’re asking their kids to read.  And, if it is the place of schools to ask this question, then shouldn’t we also try to address the need for parents to be more technologically literate?  Can we teach both the parents and the students?

          

4. Even if these benefits outweigh the dangers, and
   parents are complicit, can school district administrators and teachers
   really choose to endanger children simply to teach them the art of
   digital conversation and create personal learning
   networks?

   Why is blogging with students immediately equated with endangering children? I don’t see how you get there.

As
a parent, I want to sign-off on any use of virtual spaces that my
sixth grader engages in. She is a budding flower, and like any dad,
I’m worried and want to protect her. The fact is that she has an
naivety and innocence to her interactions with others. It is
difficult to impress upon her the dangers of real people as sexual
predators, much less virtual predators she will not see coming until
it is too late.

    I very much respect Miguel’s desire to keep his daughter and students safe.  I share his concerns. My daughter is younger than his, and I want to make sure that she’s as protected as possible as she moves through life.   But I don’t know how you get from blogging to endangerment, unless you think that blogging is really all tied up in sites like Myspace.com.  Myspace.com is to blogging what the Weekly World News is to journalism.
    I teach journalism, but let me assure you that I do not teach from, nor recommend my students read the tabloids.    And I don’t send students to Myspace.com. 
    But I do think that there’s value in the potential to have a public audience.  I do find value in the idea that students can create content that will be useful to others.   I like the idea that schools are bigger than the buildings that contain them.  The Internet makes that possible.  Closed networks create digital schools that aren’t too much different from the schools we’ve got now. 
    I said this in my podcast the other day, and I think it bears repeating — there is value in building school-only networks and creating school-only blogs.  But is there more value in public spaces?  I believe there is.  Yes, there’s also potential risk — risk that I think can be moderated and minimized.  But, I’ll acknowledge, not one hundred percent eliminated. 
   Of course,  there’s risk in crossing the street.  Last I checked, we were still sending kids outside and teaching them to look both ways before they hit the crosswalk.
    I don’t know that Miguel and I are going to agree on this, and I don’t intend to keep volleying back and forth — I’m sure he has better things to do.  I think the point, at least on my end, has been made.  But I wonder what gets filtered next, after the commercial blogging sites are gone. 
    Doug’s written a very interesting post about this conversation, too.  But I need to reread it a few times before I’m ready to comment.  As usual, the writing’s good and the ideas are better.  Here’s the conclusion, good words to end a day with:

We have to engage students in discussions about things that matter to
them and act as guides and interpreters to the world they are living
in. Choices, yes absolutely. It’s how students learn. Authority, yes as
well. It’s our duty. Kids need all manner of guidance, and they look to
us for leadership. They also trust us to keep them safe. We owe them
the benefit of our experience and our knowledge of the world. The
balance between responsibility and the need students have to take a
risk is real, but it’s not a static limit. It shifts and moves with
each individual. None of the institutional barriers restricting access
to information will matter if we are truly engaged in honest dialog
with our students. I don’t believe there is a choice for us to make
between one extreme or another. I think we have to be both ally and
authoritarian, depending on the circumstance. Dialog is key. When we
speak from our hearts to theirs they know we care. Our challenge is to
help students imagine a better future than the one that will be handed
to them by default. How we do that is a creative process that nobody -
to my knowledge - has mastered.

    Anne’s latest post reminds me an awful lot of my school.