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.

[Laura Gibbs]

WOW, Ed, I really really REALLY feel for you here...

Teaching online, and having my students do ALL their work online, sharing with each other, has transformed my classes from tedious, rote, Gen.Ed. requirements into something really exciting where every semester I have to turn away dozens and dozens of students who positively want to take these classes (having heard about them from their friends), simply because I don't have room.

STUDENTS LOVE LEARNING ONLINE.

They also love using Facebook and so on... but that doesn't bother me at all, because I am not trying to control their lives at any specific moment in time. My classes are asynchronous. So, as long as the students manage to tear themselves away from Facebook and YouTube for 6-8 HOURS PER WEEK (which is what I ask of them), then how they spend the rest of their time online is fine with me.

While they are in my class, they are publishing websites with Mozilla Seamonkey Composer or GoogleSites, they are blogging with Ning, they are using GoogleDocs to do drafts of their writing, they are browsing through our class links library at Delicious... IT WORKS. IT'S GREAT.

And I am so sad to hear that your efforts to bring online learning to your school have been so thoroughly thwarted. All I can say is that the struggle really IS WORTH IT. As a teacher, I never before experienced anything close to the satisfaction I do with these online courses, exactly because of what you say here: it makes it possible to develop useful, learner-centered methodologiesto capitalize on the technology.

Reading your post makes me feel very lucky that I am able to do what I am doing, largely unnoticed and entirely unregulated by my institution that just collects the tuition checks from the students, and then hands the students over to me, no questions asked. I occasionally feel very depressed seeing that so few of my colleagues teach their online classes with any web2.0 technology (it's all Word documents and locked-down content in the course management system). But at least I've been given the chance to explore these other technologies on my own... with great new technologies coming online all the time.

DON'T GIVE UP, ED!!!!!!! Your students need you to fight this fight.