One Big Room

The educational blogosphere is alive with concerns about measures and methods to control children's and young adults' access to the Internet. Andy Carvin has set up a RSS feed on DOPA news and Miguel Guhlin explains the limitations of a proxy filter on a home computer.

Sorry folks - anyone who thinks he or she can control kids access to online information or experiences is spitting in the wind. We are not facing a simple technical challenge. We are swimming against a cultural tide.

Neil Postman explains why in his book The Disapperance of Childhood (1982). It's been awhile since I have read this book, but as I remember, Postman's arguments go something like this. Childhood is a social construct. Before the Industrial Revolution, children were simply treated as small adults. They dressed like adults, they worked like adults, they lived where adults lived, and they saw what adults saw. Adults and children before the second half of the 19th century all lived pretty much in one big room.

The rise in industrialization gave rise to the concept of "childhood." Society started treating children differently than they did adults, separating them by dress, by activity and especially in experience. We kept kids in their own rooms with very limited access to adult rooms. For their own safety, of course.

Postman argued that with the ubiquity of mass media (pre-Internet days), society no longer has the ability to keep children away from adult venues and sights. We are all back into one big room, as it were. Kids will see and experience again what adults see and experience.

When I first started arguing against filtering back in 1994, I'd ask workshop participants if they felt these were appropriate materials for children to be seeing and reading:

• Sex After 35, Why It’s Different, Why it Can be Better
• Men & Sex - Their 7 Secret Wishes
• How Our Sex Life Was Saved
• Major New Sex Survey - What You Don’t Know...
• The Sexual Games of the American Male
• He Want’s What? Men’s 6 Biggest Sexual Fantasies
• The Sex Skill Men Adore (& How to Do It Well)
• The Hugh Grant Syndrome - Why Guys Pay for Sex
• Five Total Turn-ons Men Can’t Resist

Everyone agreed that these were not materials suitable for kids. And they should be denied access to them.

Too late, I'd say. Each of these were headlines splashed on the front cover of popular magazines easily found near any grocery store checkout lane (and last I checked things have not become less explicit.)

This cultural shift that is removing the wall between the kids' and adults' rooms is unnerving to say the least. Our natural inclination as parents and educators (and even politicians, I suppose)  is to shelter and to protect. But responsible adults also recognize that it is in their children's best interest not to shelter, but to teach children how to protect themselves in the big, bad world.

As we are all pushed further and futher into the one big room, we don't have a choice. By blocking access to blogs and chat and other Internet resources in schools and homes, we are only denying access to kids in places where any actual adult instruction may occur. So just how ironic is that?

Preventing plagiarism

A teacher in the district sent me a link to the following article in the June 17 LA Times: Teachers Adjust Lesson Plans as Web Fuels Plagiarism. Big shock - kids are using the web to plagiarize term papers and teachers are having to modify their assignments because of it. Gee, the mass media is right on top of things.

This topic has been of real interest to me since, hmmm, at least a 1996 column. And I will stand by the assertion I made in that column and in a subsequent article: "Don't blame kids for using plagiarism to keep from having to reinvent a boring wheel. You want some originality and creativity, you gotta ask for it."

Are "term papers" archaic? Will anyone mourn their passing? What can be substituted to show a student has engaged in a meaningful way with a large body of information?

Mischief and Mayhem revisited

"We don't let people drive until they're 16. They can't vote until they're 18, and they can't drink until they're 21. Yet kids in the third grade are on the Internet." Dan Janke, teacher.

I've been writing about the ethical use of the Internet for the better part of 10 years. I just checked. Why?

This morning's Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper included the story Internet Give Power to Vengeful Students which was a recap of incidents occurring in a local town and summary a variety of similar cases across the country. A teacher, Dan Janke,  was suspected of sending sexually explicit e-mails to 6th grade girls. It was quickly discovered that his email address had been "spoofed" by a couple of 7th grade boys, but not until after he had been suspended.

As similar incident happened in our district about 10 years ago (yes, Mankto IS  always on technology's cutting edge), and I wrote a column about it: Mischief and Mayhem . On re-reading my thoughts at the time, I didn't take the topic seriously enough. What I at the time called "mischief," may indeed be causing more harm than I had then ever imagined.

Mr.Janke's quote which opens this blog entry caught my attention, asking me to consider again, "What is the right age for students to be given Internet access? be given e-mail accounts? be allowed unsupervised access to IM, MySpace, chatrooms, etc.? In our righteous efforts to help of students become "technologically literate." are we, teacher and parents both, pushing them into cyberspace without sufficient guidance?

One thing that has always bothered me is that our district's Internet Acceptable Use Policy is written at probably at least an eighth grade reading level. Yet our district, like most, routinely has even primary school children using Internet resources - presumably following guidelines they cannot yet read. Where are the studies that look at student's online activities and ask at what stage of moral development do students need to be operating in order to be both safe and ethical?

A number of years ago, I did a program evaluation for a suburban Milwaukee school district. At the time, the board had banned computers from all classrooms below fourth grade. I was appalled. Today, I am thinking the district was wise.  The Alliance for Childhood has long advocated delaying using technology with kids, giving children a chance to play, to interact with real objects in physical environment, and read and be read to from real books.

What would be really be lost by removing all K-3 student computers in our schools?  Eliminating all elementary student computers? Besides sales to computer and software companies, of course?

And be careful my constructivist friends - kids were engaged in such learning long before computers.