CPVPV

The Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (CPVPV) is the official name of the religious police in Saudi Arabia. I rather like the name itself (where can I get a t-shirt?), but I wouldn't want to be in charge of such an organization in my school. Unfortunately, the propagation of virtue and prevention of vice are roles that some tech departments have assigned themselves. Heaven knows why.

Wes Fryer, the IT Guy at TechLEARNING.com gets it partially right in his article Blocking MySpace.com and on his personal blog writing mySpace and iSafety. Bless his heart, Wes does advocate for a least-restrictive environment as the best place to teach kids how to use the Internet. As Carol Simpson likes to say, teaching kids Internet safety in an over-filtered environment is like teaching kids to cross the street by never letting them out of the basement.

But what Wes alludes to, but does not address is who, in the end, makes the decision to block or not bock mySpace or any site on the Internet? He only says:

Whether or not the final decision of the district is to block in-school student access to MySpace.com, these issues must be raised and publicly addressed. 

How?

Some readers may know this is a real pet project of mine - getting every district, with the help of our professional associations, to have formal processes in place to determine what web resources are blocked and which are not. And such a process IS workable. We folks on the tech side, need to quickly determine a means of establishing a process for making choices about whether resources should or should not be blocked - or we are in for a world of hurt. And here's why..

• Today a teacher asks that a game site is blocked. The IT department complies.
• Tomorrow a parent asks that a site on gay marriage, evolution, or a right-wing Christian fundamentalist be blocked.
• The day after that, another parent or teacher asks that those sites be unblocked.

Who is left in the middle?  If we have established a past practice of blocking (or unblocking) any request,  we will always have to block (or unblock) every request AND we will probably be spending an inordinate amount of time doing so. 

The decision of whether to block or not block should be done formally, openly, and in the same way any other material challenge is handled in a school district. Period.

IT folks, you really don't want to be considered  your school's Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. Don't we have more important jobs to do?

Are Mankato teachers ready for blogs?

While I am not sure it is ready for prime time, I've changed our monthly TechTips newsletter from  e-mail to a blog format. The feed is http://oncourse.isd77.k12.mn.us:16080/weblog/djohns1/?flavor=rss2 (Had some trouble figuring this one out in Bloglines.)

While anyone is welcome to subscribe, the  focus of the blog will be the same as that of the newsletter - items of technology and library related interest to teachers in our district.  If the past couple weeks has been any indication, teachers will be seeing what I think are among the most interesting posts from blogs I read.

Initially, I plan to send an email out each Tuesday with a recap and links to each blog entry. I'm guessing it will be a while before people get into RSS feeds or just checking the site for updates.

We'll be doing an inservice for teachers in early February on creating a blog of one's own. We've got the OSX server running its flavor of blojsom (with damn little support from Apple on this, BTW.) 

I'll letcha know how it goes. Any advice on making this successful would be greatly appreciated.

Oh, interesting that this morning, the headlines (1) (2) of the Mankato Free Press  was all about two blogs being written by Mankatoans. Is blogdom going mainstream even here in Left Overshoe, Minnesota?

Romance and the long tail and other random thoughts

Another reason why school administrators need good tech skills

This morning's Star Tribune reports that Minneapolis Public Schools' superintendent, Thandiwe Peebles, is on her way out, due in large part to allegations that she asked her staff to do research for her class assignments. Had Ms Peebles good technology skills, she could have simply downloaded her papers off the Internet.

Don't let Dick Cheeney read books

I'm convinced Mr. Cheeny's request for Google records comes after he (or a staffer) read  John Battelle's The Search and his concept called The Database of Intentions - "Google knowing what our culture wants" based on what search terms are popular and which are not. I'm a couple chapters into The Search. It's excellent.

Don't judge a book by its cover

Excellent.

 

Not excellent. (Reads like a combination Landmark Biography and company promotional brochure.) Don't be fooled like I was by similar covers...

 Romance and the long tail

Privacy issues have been making the news quite a bit lately - cell phone call records available for sale, registration required for Amazon's Look Inside the Book, and of course the feds request for Google records after already gotten them from MSN and Yahoo.  We've long taught our teachers and students that nothing is private on the Internet, including e-mail. Yet no one seems to take such admonitions very seriously. Even if one's e-mail isn't made public today, the old stuff is probably sitting on a  yahoo, gmail or your school's back-up server somewhere.

Should some enterprising and extremely bored individual ever decide to do some datamining on e-mail from my past, s/he would likely encounter some rather embarrassing e-mail exchanges between the LWW and me from our courting days. The e-mail flew hot and heavy between Mankato and Minneapolis for a while. And we still exchange a romantic sentiment now and again.

So here is my advice for virtual lovers and the plan that the LWW will be adopting: code phrases. From now on in my email:

• Dear = Hey, hot baby
• curriculum meeting = lovemaking
• differentiated instruction = that thing you do I really like
• yours = love
  

 So,

Dear Anne,
At this evening's curriculum meeting let's look into differentiated instruction again.
Yours,
Doug

Don't say I didn't offer a means of escaping the long tail, you romantics out there.