Blocked Site

Blocked Site

Alas, went to work during my hols again today and of course, all social networking sites are blocked to staff, regardless of position in the school. I will request that Twitter is unblocked – and Facebook, but suspect my request will be denied. We are so starved of information about the changes that will take place in schools – laptop and wireless networking rollout – that a few more people on Twitter from DET may help us all understand what is actually going on.

Youth Twitter

Some staff are keen to use blogs and with the vodpod widget should be able to develop a good resource that students can access at home and school. I am sure good ideas will emerge as understanding grows.

It is a pity that Twitter cannot be accessed at work; this Wired article explains the benefits. I was going to check if YouthTwitter can be accessed through the filter today but didn’t have a chance too. Some ideas for using this with students are emerging.

Web 2.0 and Work

A tough day today. The internet was down all day and the SBR reporting system could not be accessed for more than an hour or two at the height of report season. It is frustrating that staff (and students) are blocked from using many of the Web 2.0 sites I take for granted at home but yet another outage after the email debacle in the first few weeks of term is just depressing.

Following Mark Pesce on Twitter since listening to his keynote a week ago and I note, after another keynote to educators today has written:   

	mpesce Filtering and blocking is an abrogation of responsibility on the “wisdom of use” – and schools must impart that wisdom!
	mpesce The kids working at home do things completely differently from what is happening in the classroom – almost scary they’re so far ahead.
	mpesce Schools talk about Web2.0, but haven’t come to grips with the whole social network thing. How to engage that in learning evnironment?

Teaching students to use the net appropriately and taking Gilmore’s Law seriously – that the internet routes around censorship – would make more sense.

Watch Pesce’s ‘Gilmore’s Law’ talk to Telstra on my vodpod list (right).

Already it is simple for students to send an attachment with an inappropriate image to or from their DET email into any school but the notion we filter out the what makes the net so useful is just foolish. We don’t ban knives from restaurants because some maniac might plunge your knife threw your heart. If someone breaks the rules society has laws that can be enacted. Look at how amazingly well Wikipedia works with the regulations in place.

The other comment – the ‘scary’ one – is perhaps the heart of our issue. The kids are asked to ‘power down’ to come to school and it is just not the real world. Even if we had all the infrastructure in place across the state in our school system, we do not have enough teachers trained – or understanding the paradigm shift – to staff it…yet!