David Warlick makes a great point about the ramifications of blocking blogs instead of teaching blogs and the message it sends to our students when he asks
For the sake of protecting our “behinds”, are we shoving learning out the doors of our schools?
I’ll say it again, the more I think about this and the more I see it happening, the more I think that this is about losing control over the content rather than safety. That is not to say that there aren’t safety issues out there. Certainly schools have to protect their students. But what schools also have to do is teach students to protect themselves. In the days when we owned 95% of the content our students were exposed to, it wasn’t an issue. But today, with a world of information at our fingertips, we don’t own much of anything anymore. Students are accessing from home all the stuff we don’t want them to access from school. And, as David says, this all goes far beyond schools. But I think he really nails it when he says
When the students see their network as a wall between them and information, then that school is no longer being a school.
Amen to that.
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