How can we protect our students from certain kinds of information and content on the internet? It used to be so easy to do. Ten years ago, most students’ only internet access was at school. Teachers really had complete control over what information students were exposed to, and importantly to this discussion, what information they were not exposed to. If information were water, it was a trickling brook and it was not hard to build a weir, or divert water so that it missed our students, keeping them safe.
But carrying the same analogy forward, now, if information were water it would be a river. Its impossible to divert water to avoid it reaching our students. If we as teachers stand in the river, trying to divert the water to protect our students, it will just swirl around us as though we weren’t even there. Instead we need to work with our students, and help them to safely negotiate the river of information that they are in. “Put your foot on that rock there, be careful! there’s a deep spot there, look out for that eddy!”.
Now I am not arguing that we should stop filtering content altogether. There are some things that we must do to try to protect students from inadvertently stumbling upon unsavory material. But (and here is the crux of my argument) if students are going to deliberately SEEK unsavory material, the fact is, we can no longer stop them even if we try to. They have internet at home, the tech-savvy ones can often get around our filters at school, they have mobile phones with internet access. The only way to stop students finding unsavory material is to influence them so they no longer want to deliberately SEEK it out.
At the moment, our failing attempts to protect the few ill-meaning students who deliberately seek out offensive content, are successfully frustrating the educational experience of the well-meaning majority of students.
HOW we change the attitudes of those ill-meaning students, is another (and more challenging) topic. But in an information-rich world, the role of a teacher can no longer be “information-controller”, it must increasingly be “shaper-of-attitudes”.
Schools used to be able to choose between shaping the choices of students (“difficult”) and just blocking the content (“easy”). I don’t think we have that choice any more, as blocking content is no longer “easy” but “nearly impossible”.
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“Shaper of attitudes”…how true that is! As I heard John Pearce (http://johnp.wordpress.com/) say recently, “Web 2.0 is changing so rapidly it’s like trying to catch smoke”. Without doubt, the only way that we can tackle this is to be as you say, a “shaper of attitudes”. And I believe our students are so grateful to us when we do give them the skills to navigate their way through the world of the web.
Our school had so many issues with “everything being blocked”. It was THE number one complaint by staff who, rightly so, couldn’t understand why users couldn’t access a podcast on the ABC web site or legitimate research sites. The school made the decision to wipe the slate clean – no more “tweak this setting, tweak that setting”, it just wasn’t working. They started from scratch, only blocking the absolute obvious. Since the changes I have not received any groans about “Why is this site blocked?” But of course, that is only the first step, education and active supervision are the key.
Andrew, your “river analogy” describes the situation perfectly. How fortunate we are to have educators like you who can lead students and teacher through the waters.
🙂
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