I just finished my three-day stint at the High School’s New Face conference and I have to say I’m impressed and encouraged by the conversations here. Last night at dinner, people said their eyes had been opened and that for many at least, they felt had a real chance to make some changes at their schools. There was a lot of excitement about the technology, about the willingness to consider different models of schools (like The Met) and about the strategies for bringing those changes about.
But there was a moment in today’s last workshop session that captured the road ahead for this group and for the others that have gone down this path. I was just finishing up an hour on podcasting, showing them how to save Skype calls and mix them with music and other mp3 files, and showing them how easy it is to create an audio post and a podcast with Odeo. It was great, I mean, they even broke into semi-spontaneous applause at how easy it all was, and it was obvious they were getting juiced by the potentials. Life was good…
…until, of course, someone noticed that the number 9 listed podcast on Odeo is called “Open Source Sex.”
“So much for that,” the teacher who noticed it said. “They’ll never let this site through.” Talk about air going out of the balloon. I think I rescued it by reminding them how easy it is to do this with Audacity and OurMedia, but the point was clear. We may have great ideas and be thinking differently about learning, but it ain’t gonna fly when implementation time comes.
And so there it is. Another one of those nasty little truths about all of this. The biggest shift is not the technology, not the practice, not even the implementation. It’s the cultural, social shift that moves us from the idea that we must prevent our kids from seeing and engaging with this “stuff” to the idea that says, look…it’s a different world…they’re going to find sex and porn and bad stuff and bad people no matter how hard we try to keep them from it, but when we weigh that fact against the incredible learning potential that the Web provides, we’re going to choose to educate rather try to block and filter it all.
What kills me most about all of this is that I have yet to see anyone cover the eyes of their kids when they go into a magazine store and every skinny, big-breasted super model or super actress is right at eye level, or change the channel when scantily clad women dance provocatively in front of half naked, muscle bound men in the name of selling beer or music or whatever else, or stop them from going to movies filled with violence, abuse, objectification and the rest. Why is there no outrage over that? Is it because that’s done within full view of parents? Is it because we’ve just become so inured to it that we don’t see it. (I doubt that.) Is the Web different because the kids are at the controls? What is the mentality that says seeing it all around us in public is somehow less “damaging” than seeing a word on a Website somewhere?
Just to be clear, I don’t like it at all that this is a much more difficult, complex world for all of us to have to navigate. I’ve said this before, but every time I think what my own kids see and hear just in the course of their normal day, I get just totally disgusted with what we choose to subject them to as a society. But that’s the reality. And I deal with it by pointing it out at every turn, by making sure they have the editorial skills they need to deconstruct the image and get to the message and understand the motives behind it. And to frame all of it in a larger context of what beauty and health and happiness really is. I can’t keep them from that bad stuff. But I can help them understand it and to at least have a chance of making good decisions about it when they are confronted with it.
But we’re just not willing to deal with that in schools, it seems. Why is that?
technorati tags:media, education, society, Web
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This is a great post and I agree. It seems that as a society we want to shelter our children and blame other people for our kids not being able to handle what they are subjected to. I would like to see more parents, teachers, and schools educate students about how to deal with the world rather than try and keep them from it for as long as they can. Maybe we feel guilty letting our children see and hear certain things, or are afraid what others will think of us? I think schools are afraid of mad parents, politics, reputation, and getting in trouble.
So well said…as an elementary school librarian I am becoming more and more concerned and passionate about teaching my students to become critical consumers of information and ethical users of technology. Perhaps if we can start teaching these things at an earlier age, when they get to that tumultuous age of adolescence, those values will be instilled. Critical thinkers…that’s what I hope to encourage. We don’t keep our children from crossing the street because it’s dangerous. We teach them how to do it safely.
On the other hand, there is a vast space between “things we should forbid our students to see” and “things we should include (compel!) as part of our classroom practice.” Public services like flickr, YouTube & Odeo fall in that middle ground, in my opinion.
Put another way, we teach kids how to cross the street safely, but we don’t design schools with streets running through the middle of them either.
I’ve just (re)read Joshua Meyrowitz’ book: “No Sense of Place”. Meyrowitz has some very interesting and balanced thoughts on “The Blurring of Childhood and Adulthood” (chapter 13). He reminds us, that the concept of childhood is a relatively new, and that the concept is closely connected to “Literacy”. What we may have to do is to rethink our construction of “childhood”. This time without excluding children from society, I hope.
And just to stand up for Flickr: offensive photos are rare and Flick has a Flag function. Teach the children to use that and do use it yourself.
I have been reading about your 3 day workshop and was very impressed with some of the blogs that were created. Especially those created by principals, they are stepping out of their compfort zone. To your question I am going to answer that on the side of caution. I don’t think it is a matter of sheltering our students from what they may see or find on the web rather a point of responsibility and accountability. I speak only on behalf of my experiences in NYC. A principal, Assistant principal or teacher does not want to deal with having something inappropriate pop up on their watch. I think the thought is scary because they do not know what the child will go home and say. They do not want to be held responsible for “exposing children” to what they should not see. Especially in a classroom. I often get calls from principals that somehow an inappropriate site got through our filter, and the panic in their voice. I explain that these things happen and we will take steps to block the inappropriate site. But that just adds another road block in the journey for collaboration and communication.
I agree with all the points you made about what parents are willing to allow their children to watch and play. I just feel in the classroom their is an added tension of responsibility of content. Unfortunately their are some teachers and administrators that still feel better safe then sorry and don’t want to end up on page six of the New York Post.
That is not to say that we should not continue to provide opportunities for them to see the power of online collaboration and communication used correctly in the context of instruction.
I’ve faced the same exact situation in staff development programs when using Odeo. And the reaction has been the same. Your last paragraph points to the responsibility you believe in deeply about personally educating your kids. We all know schools serve many different types of kids and families and that their beliefs differ greatly; these beliefs contribute greatly to the development of the schools climate and culture. As their employees, we must approach our job and profession with that in mind. Would I like to use Odeo-yes. But the majority of the parents in my district would object, even though their kids see things all the time like you describe in your post. They would continue by saying that while they might see such things every day, they don’t want them seeing them at school…
Why not just use Audioblogger as a platform for podcasts, posting from their cell phones-we’re always trying to find a valid use for all the phones they carry-there it is.
It seems to me that we really need to take the bull by the horns and share the tools with our board and parents and put it on the line with them: Do you want us to educate your children so that they can be safe in the world they are growing up in or bury our heads in the sand and let them struggle through willi-nilli?
I belive that if we have these discussions with our parents and Boards of Education and share the data that Will shared with us regarding the number of sites, posts, comments, wikis, and blogs being created each day along with positive examples for how we can use these tools to help their children to be successful in life– I just have to believe that they, just like us, will see the value in doing so.
While I agree with some of what you are saying the fundamental difference is we do not have magazines on our school library bookshelves with that sort of content or show that sort of thing to our kids in school intentionally, in any other form.
Schools and schooling have to conform to the highest common (moral/ethical??) denominator, not necessarily what is acceptable in a wider social context. I would hope our school is setting the example in our community not necessarily simply offering a reflection of what some deem OK.
I certainly don’t think I am a prude but as a principal and educator I feel we have an obligation to err on the side of caution with respect to what we do in our schools, the software we use, etc.
The sad thing I suppose is that a perfectly good app has found the need to accept sexualised advertising is an OK part of its marketing/ format??
liability.
As some people have put it so nicely, when you’re a teacher you really have to be cautious about what you use with your underage students. It’s not that you are not right (because you are, and that is how things should be), but a teacher might end up working against him/herself by creating even more obstacles to the use of technology in class. I think it’s about time people atarted looking at many of these agents in the mediasphere with a more critical eye, because they sure are making the task of educating children and teenagers very hard 🙁
One thing we need to remember is that all things change. This information landscape that we are trying to understand and integrate into what and how we teach is a rapidly changing form. The circumstances will change before our eyes, our cultural vision of online community will mature, and what seems edgy today will be mainstream tomorrow.
We simply need to keep trying to understand it ourselves, vision its place in teaching and learning, and shout out that vision.
Yes, you are right, we have to tell that new story 😉
I had a few teachers and several moms and dads in my cyberporn course. They came in scared about what their kids could see, and left even more scared in some ways, but I think the overall idea of mitigating rather than banning got through to every one of them. I’m not as anti-filter as some people are, but I think the best filter–the one we should be most interested in developing–is our students’ own minds.
Attempting to shelter our students is really only sheltering ourselves. The school may not be Main Street, but students cannot be locked behind the gates of the school at all times; and I for one wouldn’t want them to be! It is our responsibility to teach students to be responsible in controlling their own intellectual diet. Pretending that by not have access to sexually explicit materials in the schools we are somehow keeping students safe from seeing porn is an abdication of that responsibility.
I wish parents and teachers would stop wringing their hands, read the NAS report, and develop strategies for educating kids about sexually explicit communications. Unfortunately, since the political climate makes it difficult to even talk about sex with students, I fear that we will continue to lag the developed world in such awareness. And the cost is more than just moral–it is an ongoing cultural and health disaster.
When you mentioned the air going out of the balloon, I started wondering how many puffs of air will be going out all over the US in August and September when all the new bloggers (so many launched from NECC, it seems) find they are blocked from their blogs at school. Most districts routinely block access to blogspot.com, typepad.com, wordpress.com, flickr.com, and more. Even edublogs.org is on the default block list of some filtering services. Do all these new joiners to the blogosphere know this? I wonder…
The whole web 2.0 movement is just one big moot point if teachers can’t get to it from school. – Mark
Will, I felt the “air going out of the balloon” too. You are right, parents have obligations to teach their children moral filters. I do this with my son constantly. However, I also agree with David J. in that our schools are made up of so many different kinds of parents and kids that in reality, we would never come to a consensus (in any society) about right and wrong. So, my plan this fall is very similar to Garry Stone’s. We need to convince the boards of education and parents to see the value of educating our kids to be safe in a changing world. We can’t keep our kids in a bubble. Hopefully, as our cultural ideas shift, our minds will open.
Wait a minute. I attended the three days, couldn’t leave, left totally jazzed about the potential and now am tuning into this blog after a ten hour work day. Why? Too much to say in a comment so as my noble instructor Will taught me. . . tune into my blog at ghsprincipal.edublogs.org. Sorry Will, I know you also taught me all that html lingo so that only the name would show up here as a link, but, hey, my notes are at school where I was too busy all day to read what’s happening in my new blog world that no one I know understands. But, oops, that’s the point of my blog. See you there.
One of the things I’ve been stunned by recently is the realization that we as educators often think very differently to the parents of the kids we teach. They (at least some of them) are NOT doing what you consider to be so natural and teaching their kids how to deal with these issues in their daily life. They just don’t seem to see how their kids’ values are being influenced by what they choose to watch on TV (on their TVs in their bedrooms, where their parents have no idea what they’re watching.) Then there are the parents who are not allowing their kids to use any of these new technologies at home, and their kids are fascinated by them and take every opportunity to use them at friends’ houses (or at school.) These are the families that have created the demand for the ‘family’ tier of programming from the cable companies and who are stereotyped as ultraconservative and religious.
I remember at one school being challenged by a student about why I was being so strict about a particular matter and explaining that the school’s position on it was that we should represent the most conservative of parents.
I think sometimes we don’t confront certain issues in school because there is a fear of what the reaction from the parents wil be, given that they would not necessarily agree with us. The fear may be our own as individual teachers, or it may be an institutional fear coming from and supported by the administration.
Exactly! you have hit the nail on the head-every time I let a “bad” word slip out in class, I ask the students, “Who watches MTV?” of course, most of them do, and it is much worse than I could ever come up with! Thanks for the blog.
Perhaps this will seem flip, but my one-word response to the comment above — “liability” — is “courage.” We regularly use the fear of “liability” as an excuse to avoid having to stand up to the noisiest and most close-minded of our community. We need educational leaders who can stare down those who put their own hyper-fears ahead of all else, and force everybody to dance to the tune of their paranoid tunes. No, we may not put a street down the main hallway of the school, but we don’t ban streets from around the school, nor do we pretend that cars don’t exist because occasionally people get run over. It is time to restore courage to the conversation, and model what it means to have a backbone.
Will,
Your own comment… #21 is the most telling. The reason that message boards fall flat is that it doesn’t offer a broader audience to the student than the one he/she was in class with earlier in the day. The reason Blogging is so effective is the fact that the audience is larger, MUCH LARGER. This lets the student know that they are on display for the world to see, not just the same 30 +/- students they are in class with.
So, having said all of this, the other comments that have been made to this post come into play. How do we ‘control’ what students say and what they see when accessing material on the Internet? The quick answer is that we don’t. Any school that has a filter and thinks this is going to keep the kids safe is fooling themselves. The students have plenty of ways to evade any filtering scheme that is currently being used by schools. There are over 250 proxy sites that completely bypass district firewalls if they are using the URL to filter. Image filters, will only filter pornographic images, but there is much more that parents and administrators want to be blocked. Therefore, Will’s comment and the comments of others are truly what we need to emphasize and get across to parents, administrators and school boards. We need to have a concerted effort to educate students as to what is and what is not appropriate content in a school setting. I encourage students and teachers alike that they have two online personas. One is their ‘social persona,’ where they go to myspace and message back and forth with their friends. They have nearly absolute free speech in this context. (notice I said ‘nearly’) As a teacher, I don’t want to receive e-mail from a student using an e-mail address of ‘sexysuzie@hotmail.com.’
The other persona they have is a ‘professional’ or ‘academic’ persona. This is where they respond to teachers and other students in matters relating to their academic/professional life.
Students need to learn to make these distinctions, but we need to teach them how to do so. The best information I have seen to address some of these issues is the ‘Digital Citizenship’ site created by two education professors at Kansas State University. (http://www.educ.ksu.edu/digitalcitizenship/)
What do you think?
You said “I have yet to see anyone cover the eyes of their kids when they go into a magazine store and every skinny, big-breasted super model or super actress is right at eye level, or change the channel when scantily clad women dance provocatively in front of half naked, muscle bound men…”
We’ll have to meet sometime. My wife and I definitely cover eyes, change the channel, etc – and actually watch mostly DVDs because of the stuff we don’t wish our kids to see.
David, maybe what I should have said is that I have yet to see anyone TEACH their kids when they go into magazine stores… Covering their eyes without explaining to them why we’re doing it is akin to the filtering we do in schools. Just a thought.
I’d agree with you there – doing ANYTHING without teaching why doesn’t do too much (for me, anyway).
Just wanted to make it 27 comments.
I find this entry very significant for my current position. I am an administrator in a very conservative Mennonite community whereby there is great concern over exposing children to the ills of the “big bad world.” My fear is that sheltering the children in our community will only lead them to want to leave the community as quickly as they possibly can once they graduate. How can we begin to address this problem in our community?
I so appreciate all of the perspectives and comments in this post. As a Tech Facilitator, I find myself siding with Will. Education’s reaction to the read/write web is to try to block it from our schools. I believe that it is our responsibility as educators to do just that – educate. Our students need to understand the responsible use of these new tools, and the potential dangers and consequences for their misuse! The best way to teach, as we all know is to do! We have our work cut out for us, but I believe the impact of kids sharing thoughts, ideas and learning with the world community is worth the effort! To do this we’ll have to seek the support of our parents and administrators.
Parents are frightened by what they don’t understand. But as a parent I side with Will. We might want to protect our kids from gratuitous sex and violence that our pop culture generates, but we well never block it all. The imagery is too prevalent and powerful. We have to limit exposure to the worst, and use the rest as teaching opportunities. A good example of this is the Pixar movie Cars. My 6-year-old son loved the movie and continues to act out scenes with his Matchbox cars. Yesterday he was acting out the scene where the main character has a drag race with a train. This provided an opportunity for a discussion of what really happens when people try to beat trains across the tracks and the difference between cartoons and real life. My son “gets it†now.
I do appreciate the administrator’s comments here as well. Our students come from a wide variety of backgrounds and cultures. Administrators have to deal with conflicting expectations from families as well as the demands of high-stakes NCLB testing. Again, we have to teach safe, valuable use of Web 2.0 technologies and then make the positive results highly visible to our parents. If the only press parents hear is the dangers of MySpace and YouTube, we’ll lose our opportunity to teach!
Last week I blogged about Will’s ‘big shifts’ that he uses as the end of his book. I didn’t expect much of a response from our teaching staff, since most of them wll not read their school e-mail during the summer vacation. I received two e-mail responses in the first two days. I think this is something that may gain some traction in our district in the coming year. Our Global Communications program will probably give some teachers a visualization of the type of skills we are trying to teach students.
http://chs.smuhsd.org/gc/gc.htm
(I published this on High Schools New Face Blog as well! I would love your input!)
My colleague from another division Skyped me at work. In a nutshell, Skyping is talking with someone else with computers instead of a phone. All you need is a connection and a microphone. (I am currently without a phone extension and am sharing a phone with others while our office is under construction.) It was so very cool to talk with her using Skype. She was in a room of 7 administrators, and I helped them with staff development questions, and we got A LOT of work done. We accomplished a great deal in a few short minutes. If not for Skype, we were going to have to set up a phone conference for another time or a meeting or something else that requires more time than I have. AND we did not monopolize the phone that I am sharing with others.
On Thursday, the Skype web site in our district was blocked because it was discovered that some of us have been exploring the world of Skype and its potential in our workplace. How distressing it was as I began to question why this site was being blocked. The first response was that “they” heard that it may slow the network down. When probing for more information from them, they admit there has been no evidence that supports a network slowdown, but since it is summer and fewer are using the network, then the slowdown “might” happen in the fall.
The second response was that since adults are using Skype, then kids/students might doing it as well. You probably could imagine my face when that was said outloud after spending three wonderful days at High Schools New Face, reading blogs, and having read Will’s book! So, what is wrong with students skyping with other students around the world? Isn’t this the same as the Distance Learning that we are all so used to using now in the 21st Century without the TV screens?
I would love to share with them about what a learned about the ever-expanding walls of the classroom. When talking about blogs, they said that perhaps one computer in each classroom could be designated to blog or skype or wiki or whatever it is that our teachers will want to use when returning in the fall. One computer…
I realize that we must proceed with caution and am anxious to hear how others are moving forward in the world after HSNF. I am on our Technology Planning Committee, so this matter is timely! Thanks for your input!
Welcome to the team, Melissa.
I am from Brazil and I had exactly the same arguments put forward to me. I have been fighting like a lion since 1997 to have ICT included in our school and practice. Way back then we had one computer in the teachers’ room and it was not connected. When they added 8 computers to the library, they did not want to connect them for fear the students might get distracted. Students wrote about it and we were eventually connected. I designed the first computer room in 2002, they opened another room for primary school and one more this year! No computer in the classrooms, though, maybe for fear teachers will spend their time consulting their mails or playing games, go and figure.
I was recently invited to take part in an open conference called the future of learning in a networked world. My headmaster called me to his office today and said he gives me permission to leave for 15 days but warned me I will not be paid for them as he sees the trip as an opportunity for me but has no real interest in connecting my kids to the conference and does not see how an event like this may benefit the
school.
He will take a substitute to do some “real” teaching instead as the kids cannot be left on their own and doubts whoever comes will know how to deal with computers. He mentioned he has enough work to do without all this. He admits he has not got the slightest idea of how technology
can help children to learn and qualified my work (blogging, podcast and projects) as superficial and not leading to acquisition of real knowledge.
However, I never say never and do not give up.I started with one disconnected computer and now there are three rooms, + 8 machines in the library, + 8 in the teachers’ room and I have been blogging and podcasting.
Change takes time, but it will not happen by itself. We must keep forcing it to happen through our insistence, blogging about it, showing the good practice and connecting more as we are doing now 🙂