A Pointless War

[Ed Hitchcock]

There is a battle waging, one that we cannot possibly win. The "enemy" is too resourceful, and we are battling on their home ground. I am not talking of the conflicts in Afghanistan or Iraq, but in our own halls and classrooms. I am speaking of the war to block the internet...
A few years ago the decision was made to go laptop, and it was a decision I supported, because it gives every student a complete library and multimedia production studio at their fingertips. The catch-phrases being used were "transformational learning" and "collaborative thinking space". All very Web2.0, which suited me fine (okay, the transformational learning bit was a tad hokey, but I digress).
I assembled a slew of resources, a list of guest speakers, and a year long PD plan. All faculty were required to attend the faculty meetings, which were all devoted to PD.
On paper.
As the year progressed, the meetings got cancelled, or shortened, or hijacked. Hardware was delayed. All of the guest speakers were cancelled. What remained was a shell of the original plan, and no real understanding of what teaching in a laptop environment actually means - especially not by those who were making the decisions to go ahead.
But we soldiered on, and those who had an understanding of the capabilities tried to be creative, and tried to share their ideas. And that's when the war started...
It began with the most evil of evils, Youtube and Facebook. These sites are clearly the spawn of Satan, have no practical use, are only used by stalkers and porn merchants to corrupt our youth (besides, streaming hogs bandwidth). Hotmail was close behind.
Within hours, of course, the students were accessing these sites as usual through web proxies. As each of these was shut down, the students would seamlessly switch to another. So the IT people brought in filters wich blocked all known web proxies, as well as all external mail servers, all social networking, blogs, hosting providers, personal websites, wikis, interactives, freeware, and just about everything else.
The students began using Ultrasurf, and were again seamlessely surfing the sites that the teachers could not access.
So all ports were shut down, and the students began accessing the wide world using neighbouring networks, or mobile connection sticks. And as the witch-hunt escalates, the poor beleaguered IT staff have less and less time to manage the IT infrastructure.
And in all of this, I ask myself, what of the "collaborative thinking space"? If all we wanted to do was have students use the computers to take notes, why do we have a wireless network?
The real irony is that, it seems to me, the reason the students are "getting distracted" is that the lessons are not built around the free-form, creative and collaborative methodologies that laptop learning can provide, while the ability to implement those methodologies is being severly handicapped by attempts to block the "distractions".
So not only are the Powers That Be losing the war, they also completely fail to recognize that they are the cause, and that the battle is ultimately self defeating. If half the energy, time and money spent on limiting student freedoms was spent instead on developing useful, learner-centered methodologiesto capitalize on the technology rather than restrict it, I think we would all be a lot happier. As well as all being able to get on with our jobs.

[Ed Hitchcock]

Here is an interesting update on the IT shenanigans here at the school.
Some of the more savvy hacker-wannabes figured out how to shut down others' computers remotely through a command prompt network command. This was used a few times as a practical joke to shut down computers unexpectedly. But word of it got out, and within a few days, almost everyone was shutting everyone else down. Work was being lost, teachers had no idea what was going on, the IT department was in a tizzy, and retaliatory shut-downs were rampant.
Now here's the best part. By the time IT got involved (and it wasn't long), the students were already sharing defenses against it - a simple batch file that would run in the background to automatically cancel a remote shutdown command. And that batch file had already undergone three revisions to improve its performance.
Of course, I don't condone network misbehaviour, and it is a clear violation of the acceptable use policy, but I find it very interesting that the students themselves found a solution before the "grownups" were even aware it was going on.
Like I said, we can't possibly win.

[Laura Gibbs]

Sigh is right...
I am on this virtual teeter-totter between my total enthusiasm for what kind of learning CAN take place online and intense pessimism about the institutional obstacles that get put in our way....

[Ed Hitchcock]

"but once you start going beyond that and venturing out onto the great ocean that is the Internet, great things can happen."
Which brings me back to the original post...
*Sigh*

[Laura Gibbs]

Ed, you are exactly right about the problems with maintaining content in Blackboard. Even worse, imagine what happens when you switch (and sooner or later everyone swtiches) to a new system. The course management systems do not let you ever have the control over your content that you need, which is also related to what Ian is talking about here as well. I never regard any of the stuff I do at Nings as having any kind of permanence... exactly because I cannot back them up. A blog: I can back it up to my computer. A wiki: I can back it up. And I choose my blogging and wiki tools based on that option. I also back up my Delicious links. They are in nice simple XML or HTML files that are cross-platform, so even if these online services bite the dust, I can still keep the content that matters (very much!) to me.

Ian, about edu20.org, I worked with that pretty intensively when it first got started, and I am a big fan of Graham Glass, the guru behind that system (I always read his blog; he posts some fun stuff). As a course management system, though, it suffers from problems that make it un-useful for me. I am a content-intensive person, and unless I can upload the materials from a text file, already formatted to my specifications, it is just not efficient for me. I started building my class links library there at edu20.org a few years ago but finally abandoned it in favor of Delicious, for the reasons I just mentioned... but for a more casual user, I like edu20.org very much. Graham Glass is definitely one of the very good guys in the world online!

[Ed Hitchcock]

When we first introduced Blackboard, I got excited and created learning units and assignments and adaptive release materials for a progressive mastery approach to my courses. All courses were archived, but when I came back those courses after two years, the helpful IT people said they didn't keep the archives from TWO years ago, only last year. Since the other teacher had not incorporated my materials, all that work was gone. Poof.
Way to generate incentive... :-(

[Ian Carmichael]

I'm currently spending a little time pondering edu20.org. (Following a mention over on Classroom2.0) It looks to include a swarm of course maangement tools, grades and so on - but it also has a variety of 2.0 tools - blogs, wikis, forums, groups, debates. On a cursory glance, it seems promising - I'd like to customise its look and feel, and don't know if I can yet. How permanent a trace previous classes can leave, I don't know either.
(As a programming puzzle: I wonder how difficult it would be to allow a contributor to give permission for their work to remain aftert they have gone. If, say on Ning, all my contributions are tagged currently to me - but I say I'm happy to leave my work, then when I go, the ownership of my posts goes to "legacycontributor ####". If Im not happy to leave my work, my place in any thread is taken by a note "a previous contributor has withdrawn their comments" rather than losing the whole thread - as Ning does - and did! I can't see the problem as too difficult, depending on what the database key ID is.)

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Ed, I spent several unhappy years using Blackboard; now we use Desire2Learn which is only marginally better. Increasingly I'm convinced that course management systems are the worst thing that has happened to online learning, since it promises this illusion of online learning but without any of the benefits of true sharing online. Collaboration? Hardly. Everything is locked down, and gets wiped out from semester to semester, with no option to do any publishing on the open Internet. It's had a very pernicious effect at my school, where teachers have been sold on the idea that they can build really viable online courses inside the course management system, which is just not the case. Insofar as they simply mimic the limitations of classroom-based teaching, course management systems cannot succeed: there are a lot of things you lose online by imitating the classroom model, and unless you take advantage of the Internet to make up for what you lose, of course the online courses are going to look like pale imitations of "real" classes... but once you start going beyond that and venturing out onto the great ocean that is the Internet, great things can happen.

When I show my fellow teachers the archive of hundreds and hundreds of students projects that I have online, they positively drool: nothing in the course management system world even assumes that such an archive would be a good thing. They want to re-invent the wheel every semester, wiping out everything the students have done as if the class had never happened. Very sad. I keep waiting for the course managements systems to learn how to be anything other than parasites on the body of the real Internet, but so far it is has not happened; both Desire2Learn and Blackboard are staggeringly disappointing pieces of software, despite their high prices...

[Ed Hitchcock]

Thanks for the links - it is comforting to know I am not alone...
The "collaborative thinking space" devolved to Blackboard - a decent course delivery system, but by no means collaborative. And Ning and Wikispaces keep getting blocked...
I like the signal-to-noise ratio analogy, but then I am quite fond of signal processing, in theory and practice :-)

[Laura Gibbs]

Earlier this week Stephen Downes pulled together some great commentary on an Internet blocking seminar:

Ed-Tech Vendors: The Unintentional Enemy Outside?

He links to a variety of good stuff, so I'm taking the liberty of pasting in his commentary here:

The session title was outrageous to bring Christian Long back from his hiatus - a conference seminar by Chris Ridgway, Sophos, titled The Enemy Within: Stop Students from Bypassing Your Web Filters. It sparked a wave of reaction, including a two-part post (part one, part two) from Sylvia Martinez asserting bluntly that studetns are not the enemy. And as Bud Hunt wrote to Ridgway, "I find this session title and the frame that you're using to sell your services to be offensive and beyond the pale. Our students are not our enemies and their behaviors are not rooted in violence." And Long concludes, "At worst, your language strips the very industry you are paid to serve of its mission and heart, not to mention the fairly painful irony that it attacks the very group that schools exist to advocate for...and to empower..." Christian Long, Think:Lab, November 9, 2009. [Link]

[Ian Carmichael]

Thanks Ed,

I'm wrestling this hydra too.

And this war frustrates the life out of education-minded IT staff! So many would LOVE to be helping staff to develop, access and implement strategies - but instead, their major interactions are to be policemen, whose job is seen as to be stopping, not enabling!

I'm sure there are IT staff who enjoy blocking stopping and denying - the thrill of the chase! but really, the key should be and can be 'tranformational learning'. And if our learning isn't going to be transformational, then our kids will be passing 'notes' and zoning out digitally - just like they do in the analogue world. A no brainer, really. And the control? Is to recognise the reality, and accept that there is noise in the classroom as well as signal - we can improve the signal (which doesn't mean turning up the volume! (Standardised testing regimes?)- that just turns up the related noise.)
I'm working -poorly - I confess, at improving signal - harnessing experts (other than me) through the wonderful podcasts and 'text' resources for my humanities subject - opening alternative collaboration/discovery/discussion methods through read/write web capacities.
In the signal improves, the noise will drop. (But if we drop the noise, that doesn't improve the signal. It just shifts the noise internally - so our kids zone out mentally despite our blocking the physical channels.)

I wonder if we could fight with an analogy. Students write notes to each other, and doodle on paper. Let's ban paper from the classroom. [Is anybody stupid enough to think this is a successful policy? Then why do the digital equivalent?]