Comments on: AMERICANS UNITED AGAINST EDUCATION: JOIN TODAY. ENLIGHTEN THE WORLD.

By: Clay Burell

Clay Burell — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 00:43:00 +0000

Thanks all for the comments. For the record, I probably took the email that prompted this jeremiad a little too literally, since its author later explained that the use of the word “filter” was not exactly what was meant. The leadership style in my high school is typically great, making no top-down decisions until first debated and discussed at staff meetings.

So we met, butted heads, and like two grown-ups with strong personalities and hearts in the right place, made up afterwards. Good stuff.

Roberto, your comment goes down in my Hall of Fame. Time to check your link out

By: robertogreco

robertogreco — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 23:43:00 +0000

Great email (and post). This problem with filtering is not unique to school cultures and ultimately just creates an incentive to waste valuable time finding work-arounds. It really all boils down to trust. See
this post from Chris Anderson http://tinyurl.com/22zl5h
and this summary of his talk at the Microsoft Global CIO Summit courtesy of Ross Mayfield:
http://tinyurl.com/25ar5g
for choice quotes like these:

“Don’t make people jump through a lot of hoops, the cost of experimentation is free. “Everything is forbidden unless it is permitted” vs. “Everything is permitted unless it is forbidden.”…The old idea of IT determining what is appropriate prevents experimentation at the edges…The terrifying conclusion to all this is that we may have to trust our employees.”

Thanks to David Smith for pointing me to them:
http://tinyurl.com/yrpyoj

As a side note, I’d be curious how much Bush’s presidency has inadvertently “cleaned up” the Google results for “Bush” as the focus changed from porn to his (usually Photoshopped) image. Also note that as I am making this comment, the sixth image returned from the same search is a dyptych of two statues, one of Bush and one of Michelangelo’s David. The image is from this post:
http://tinyurl.com/25la6l

By: Jeff

Jeff — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 21:18:00 +0000

I bet you know exactly how I'll respond to this.

But did you know that I sent the link (via the as-yet-not-filtered-at-school-del.icio.us) to some other members of our tech committee?

Our district just set up a portal system for students and teachers, which is cool, but, among other gripes, the only RSS feeds we can subscribe to are put out by the district and the board of ed.

By: diane

diane — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 20:21:00 +0000

Clay,

I’m still awaiting permission to use a private PB wiki with my high school Current Events class (I have an appointment with the IT on Friday) but kids can and do access comedy routines from YouTube all the time on school computers.

I guess that same filter that blocked Joyce Valenza’s School Library blog (probably for mentioning “games” or “comics”) is hard of hearing: it filters the written word, but not the spoken racy comment.

diane

By: Clarence

Clarence — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 16:34:00 +0000

Well said. A good rant gets it all out there. This is the best, most succinct quote about filtering I have seen in awhile: “Nothing Educational If Chance of Boobs Involved”