There seems to be a great deal of discussion currently, around the censored vs open internet access arrangements in places of education. Many people are discussing the issues around professional judgements of the suitability of content. There have been surveys done in the US showing that nearly three quarters of high school students see the censorship of content in places of education as their greatest barrier to using new technology in the pursuit of learning.
As important as these conversations are, they seem to skirt somewhat around the a much deeper issue of the way we prepare young people for an age where the internet, and specifically, an open access, open content internet is all pervasive. My colleague Tom Barrett posted an interesting discussion recently on his edte.ch blog that summerised Google’s recent introduction of a ‘YouTube for schools’ as a ‘sticking plaster mentality’ to dealing with the issues that open internet access brings. A lazy, ‘get out of jail free’ card that avoids the difficult and responsibility-burdened decision of whether a teacher is qualified to make a professional judgement about the suitability of content, or to what risk we expose our pupils if YouTube is open within the school environment. But why stop at YouTube?
Most open content, social media and social networking websites are blocked in schools. Yet we are only fooling ourselves if we believe that young people do not access them in their open format everywhere outside of the school, and quite possibly within school on mobile devices connected through a 3G network. Schools are becoming bizarre isolated islands, cutting themselves off from the utterly embedded nature of social web content in the society that they serve. The result is that websites like Facebook and Twitter are becoming 21st century, living examples, of the island on which William Goulding marooned a small group of boys in his 1954 novel, ‘The Lord of the Flies. Young people grouped together in self built, private networks of contemporaries that are totally without adult guidance or scrutiny.
Sadly, it is my experience that like the boys on the island, this isolation from adult support often results in the descent into savagery. Ferocious bullying, the posting of inappropriate violent or sexual material or worse still, connections to entirely unsuitable individuals. This world that explodes into the classroom every so often, after a particularly unpleasant evening on Facebook chat for example, is destructive to real world relationships and learning. In every other aspect of children’s lives adults set boundaries and educate them about social relationships and real world dangers. We discuss bullying in our classrooms but not social media. We talk about stranger danger but not social networking. We talk about the way we treat one another and what to do when you see something that upsets you but not social networking, and yet the online world is as real, if not more real than the school environment. ‘What is to be done?’ ask anxious policy makers, about cyberbullying and online predators, how can we screw social media down into tighter and tighter controls to protect our children? The answer, of course, is that we can’t. No more can anyone control social media than control society at large and nor should we want to. From social media has come, possibly the most exciting surge of creativity in the history of mankind, empowered by collaboration that was never possible before. Our role and responsibility as educators is to teach our children how to navigate the pitfalls of the web. By bringing social media and social networking into the classroom we can open it up to adult guidance and scrutiny. By shining a bright, positive light on it we drive out the darkness within that its current, hidden status provides. Failing to do this promises a future not dissimilar
Web censorship in schools creates dangerous isolation
