Many schools are struggling to keep pace with student use of Web 2.0, wireless handhelds, and smart phones. They are concerned about keeping students as safe (see previous post) and well-behaved on-line as well as off-line. And because we have less influence over the online lives of students, we often rely on filtering or keystroke monitoring software on the technical side, and “acceptable use policies” (AUP) on the human side.

Until this last year, our school had what many of us believed to be a model AUP. It’s reproduced below:

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Technology Acceptable Use Policy
All students have access to email, the Internet, and other information resources through computers in the classrooms, library, or computer labs. Access to these resources is a privilege, not a right. It is the responsibility of the student to make appropriate use of such resources to support learning. Inappropriate use may result in suspension of privileges, Judicial Committee action, or legal action.

Many teachers use email and our web site to post student assignments and other class materials. In addition, the school administration, club advisors, and others use email to communicate important information to students. Students are expected to check their email accounts at least daily.

This policy applies to all electronic devices used to access our network or used on oour campus, whether or not they are owned by us. Students who bring personal computers or hand-held devices to school should read the special restrictions on their use below.

Notice: The Technology Department uses software that enables it to support users by controlling and monitoring computer activities over our network.

Appropriate use:

• Use of computers, software, and other information resources to support learning, complete school assignments, and gain a better understanding of information technologies and their applications.
• Use of technology to collaborate with students and faculty in academic and extracurricular school functions.
• Use of file servers to store school-related and personal files.
• Use of the Internet to perform research related to academic and extracur­ricular school functions, and to communicate with scholars, students, and specialists outside of campus to improve knowledge and advance academic work.

Inappropriate use:

Any use not specified in “appropriate use,” shown above. Some examples include but are not limited to:

• Accessing the account or password of another, or in any way invading her/his privacy.
• Misrepresenting your age, name, school affiliation, or other personal information in order to gain access to age-restricted online services (e.g., Facebook, MySpace).
• Misrepresenting the school or yourself in any form of electronic communication.
• Deliberately deleting information (e.g. computer files or email) in order to conceal or camouflage inappropriate computer use.
• Failing to properly protect equipment loaned to the student by the school from damage or theft.
• Plagiarizing any material using information technology.
• Conducting any form of illegal activity using information technologies.
• Violating copyright or any contractual agreement between the school and any other entity.
• Using information technologies for communications that are judged to be obscene, libelous or slanderous, invade the rights of others, incite students to violence, or contribute to the substantial disruption of the orderly operation of the school. This includes email, instant messaging, personal websites, blogs, and other forms of electronic written communication directed at the community, even if the messages originate off campus.
• Using information technology to store, transmit, or duplicate copyrighted material.
• Installing on school computers, or, while on campus with personal computers, using distributed network client software (such as SETI@Home) and peer-to-peer sharing (such as Kazaa or Limewire).
• Installing or using computer games during school hours or at anytime in the library; all game players must release a computer to any student who needs it for schoolwork.
• Using information technology for financial or commercial activities not specifically authorized by the school or its agents.
• Deliberately degrading or disrupting the performance of any information technology device or system.
• Unauthorized use or modification, in any form, of electronic data created by another user.
• Gaining unauthorized access to data, services, or networks outside of school.
• Using information technologies to receive, store, generate, or distribute spurious or objectionable information of any kind, including chain letters.
• Posting anonymous messages.
• Distributing, forwarding, or posting personal communications of another without the author’s consent.
• Using information technologies for anything deemed to be wasteful of school resources. School resources include such things as consumable supplies such as paper, toner, ink, or limited resources including network bandwidth and server storage.
• Recording or photographing classroom presentations or campus events without the teacher’s permission.

Inappropriate use is also defined as that which might either intentionally or unin­tentionally compromises the privacy and safety of students, including:

• Posting of personal contact information about yourself or others on the Internet, including address, telephone number, school or work address.
• Agreeing to physically meet someone you have contacted, or who has contacted you online without parental consent.
• Not promptly disclosing to a teacher or other school employee any mes­sage you receive that is inappropriate or makes you feel uncomfortable.
• Using full names, student email addresses or likenesses of students in any form of electronic communication without express parental and teacher permission.
• Use of information technologies and resources is at your own risk. The school will not be held responsible for damages resulting from loss of information through the use of its network.

Since some information accessible through the network is controlled by other entities, Castilleja School will also not be held responsible for damages suffered as a result of inaccurate or undesirable information obtained through the network. In addition, there is no guarantee of privacy associated with your use of Castilleja School technology resources. School administrators, faculty, or members of the technology department, with or without warning, may access your email or file server accounts at any time.

Restrictions on the Use of Personal Computer and Hand-held Devices

Students who bring personal computers or hand held network devices for use on campus must register their equipment with the Technology Department.

Any personal computer that accesses our network in any way must have anti-virus software installed.

By signing the Student and Parent Handbook Agreement, you agree to abide by the rules and regulations stated above and by such rules as may be added over time by school administrators.

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The authors of the Old Testament could not have done a better job of creating a list of “Thou Shalt Nots” than this. And when any new technology came along that was not covered by the prohibitions, we simply create a new “Thou Shalt Not.”

What’s wrong with this picture, aside from:

• most students (and adults) didn’t read it,
• we were continually assessing whether or not a new technology was “covered” by the policy,
• it put the adults in the community into roles they were not prepare for, and
• did little to encourage students to think about their online behavior and make rationale decisions, a skill which would prepare them for lives as adults in an increasingly connected world?

So this year, we took a different tack. Instead of a list of Thous Shalt Not, we moved to a one sentence, Thou Shalt:

Students are expected to apply our Honor Code to all school activities, including those involving the use of the school’s computers, computer peripherals, and network, whether accessing them while on campus or off campus.

Simply elegant. Asking students for honorable behavior is so much better than telling them what not to do. And the fact the our school’s Honor Code was authored by students, means that it carries a lot of weight with them.

Now, to be fair, I did create some examples of honorable behavior that are listed on our Web Site for students to reference. This was done to provide discussion starters for use in advisories and classrooms, and to serve as a transition from a very detailed list of prohibited activities to one that relies on student judgment and values.

Better? I think so. But I look forward to a time when we won’t even need a list of “honorable uses.” Perhaps, over time, we will eliminate it. For now, it seems to be a good transition piece for us.

“Is it safe?” is the iconic line from the 1976 movie thriller Marathon Man starring Dustin Hoffman (as Thomas Levy) and Sir Laurence Olivier (as Christian Szell). Szell, a former Nazi war criminal with millions stashed away in diamonds, mistakenly believes that Levy is the key to his escaping the U.S. with his fortune. Using torturous dental techniques that only masochist Arthur Denton could love, he tries to coerce Levy into into revealing knowledge he does not have, repeatedly asking him:

“Is it safe?”

The Bogey man thirty plus years later is the Internet but the question remains: “Is it safe?” This is especially true when talking about the Internet and children.

And there wouldn’t be much of a story here if the Internet was totally benign. Thus it is that dozens of books, web sites, consultants, speakers, and talk shows warn us of the dangers of the Internet. Millions watch as television news shows capture Internet predators and expose them to public humiliation and criminal prosecution. Security firms capitalize on the resulting anxieties of the public (and especially parents), resulting in the sales of millions of dollars of products and services each year to answer the question:

“Is it safe?”

“Yes, but only if you use [fill in the blank and our annual subscription to keep you safe].”

Safe Practices for Life Online: A Guide for Middle and High School Students by Doug Fodeman and Marje Monroe asks the same question, but their answer might surprise you.

“It is safe?”

“Yes. If you use your head.”

In twelve chapters they outline ideas and lesson starters teachers can use to help students make wise decisions in choosing screen names and passwords, responding to cyberbullies, safeguarding personal information, and avoiding online scams. They explain how cookies work, how phishing scams appear to be legitimate, the pros and cons of instant messaging, social networking, urban legends, information literacy, and hoax web sites. I suspect that many teachers reading this book will come away with practical knowledge that they, too, can put to work in protecting their own online interactions.

Each chapter ends with five or more exercises that teachers can use with their students to explore a topic in greater depth. Some exercises are pretty lame, such as those that ask students to use Google to help define computer terms. The better ones are much more expansive, based on case studies, simulations, and thoughtful questions that could really engage mature students in substantive discussions. As is the case with any such lessons, their success lies in the ability for teachers to create a safe (no pun intended) non-judgmental classroom in which all points-of-view are allowed and preaching is minimized.

What I really like about this book is that I think it can be used to empower students to make rational choices.

A metaphor:

When you live by the ocean, you teach your children how to swim. You teach them how to play on the beach and in the water safely and responsibly. You let them know when they need to have an adult around, and what to do if there’s a problem. They learn how to read the currents and the skies. As your children grow you, too, grow more confident in their skills and maturity. Eventually your children reach an age where they can swim without your direct supervision. You can ask them “Is it safe?” and be confident that they will answer truthfully and correctly.

This book is like that. It can help students become safe in the ocean of cyberspace..

On rare occasions the authors are a bit too heavy handed for my taste, such as the blanket statement that parents should “Forbid IM until sixth grade.” Another minor criticism as that the book’s accompanying web site is still under construction. A book such as this requires an online companion to allow readers easy access to all of the wonderful online resources it references, as well as a means for the authors to update links and add new resources as they become available. Both Fodeman and Monroe have promised to do this.

This is the book I have been waiting for to teach students online safety. The authors have made a fine contribrution to the literature on Internet use in schools, and I encourage educators with interests in this area to read it.

When my daughter turned 30, I was the one that felt old.

I feel old again today.

The Mac has turned 25.

But I also feel excited because when I think back to 1984, I remember what an exciting time it was in the evolution of computing and the huge breakthroughs in user interface that the Mac ushered in. Microsoft responded a year later with it’s first version of Windows, and they have been trying to catch up ever since. Think how terrible Microsoft products might be if Mac had not forced their hand twenty five years ago.

In the mid 1990’s, it was the Internet that brought another round of innovation to computing. And Microsoft was again a bit slow to be on the uptake, letting companies like Netscape lead the way. But this time Microsoft responded with greater agility, and eventually blew Netscape out of the water. (Full disclosure: I am a former Netscape employee.)

Now in the mid 2000’s, it’s web 2.0 technologies that are creating the next wave, with Google in the cat-bird seat, and Microsoft again trying to catch up.

Apple? It continues to innovate. Sure, was on life support during much of the1990’s. But it once again found the way to be “insanely great” with the iPod and, more recently, the iPod Touch and iPhone. And I suspect such innovation to continue when the rumored Macintosh netbook/tablet is release. (Soon, please!)

Microsoft? I don’t expect innovation from them. They are the 800 pound gorrilas of followership. They encourage real innovators to take the arrows in the back, and come in with good enough knock-off copies and kazillions of dollars to buy the market. They’re very good at it, and I suspect they will continue to be good at it.

But for pure excitement, and more 1984 moments, I’ll take Mac every time.

Happy Birthday, Mac.

If Barack Obama lives up to only a half of the expectations heaped on his shoulders by the American public and the world, he will be the greatest president in history.

Our collective hopes for him are unrealistic, something we should acknowledge now lest we set ourselves up for disappointment. More importantly, we should recognize that the all this President’s horses and all this President’s men can’t put this country together again without the efforts of all Americans. And yes, this means you.

The best leaders don’t do things for you; they enable you to do things by removing barriers and encouraging risk, supporting those who try even if the try ends in failure. Most of all they bring out the best in us and remind us that we are the “we” in “we the people.”

This advice, these platitudes, apply not only to our pols or to our pals. They apply also to our enemies, those we dislike, can’t stand, or think are weird. Those people who regularly push our buttons, piss us off, cause us to roll our eyes, raise our blood pressure, and think dark thoughts about them, their children, and their little dog, too.

Psychologist Carl Jung wrote extensively about our shadow selves. I have found this to be an invaluable construct in understanding myself in general, and the visceral negative reactions I have to some people. Jung would say that my negative reaction is due to my identification with my shadow self that I see in the other. We fear that what web see in the other is also in us, or as Walt Kelly famously wrote, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” This is why it is necessary for us to embrace our opposites, our “enemies.” And perhaps, subconsciously, this is what led Lincoln to create his “team of rivals,” many comparisons to which are being made to Obama and his cabinet.

If Obama–if we–are to have any chance of turning this nation around we have to embrace our shadow selves as we embrace those with whom we disagree. Embrace not for purposes of squeezing the life out of them, knocking sense into them, or keeping their mouths shut. But an embrace that says I may not agree with you, but I will listen to you and respect you. Who you would put on your personal team of rivals? What will you do to help Mr. Obama?

Colleague Matt Montagne and I had the opportunity to sit in on today’s free webinar from ISTE entitled School 2.0: Technology and the Future of School featuring the U.S. Department of Education’s Tim Magner. Yes, the people who also brought us No Child Left Behind are actually thinking about the future of American schools and we’re impressed.

After the standard PowerPoint slides on the use of technology by today’s teens, the rise in literacy, high school and college graduation rates in the world compared to the U.S., and the imperatives they raise for the U.S., Magner showed us a new web site, School 2.0 (located at http://etoolkit.org/etoolkit). The web site has a wealth of information for educators interested in thinking about and planning for schools of the future. The site is a work in progress, with some information still to be completed. But that’s par for the course in web 2.0; always a work in progress. Of particular interest is their interactive map of a Learning Ecosystem. Be sure to check it out. Magmer has a related, much shorter presentation available on YouTube (below). If ISTE releases an archive of the seminar that is available to the public, I will post the URL on my blog.

What does “clean” smell like to you?

Many people have strong associations between cleanliness and certain aromas: PineSol (Powerful Scent of Clean™), Clorox bleach (Cleaner Homes Start with Clorox), or Glade Air Fresheners (for the perfect expression of every mood or occasion). Personal cleanliness often equates with smells like soap: Dial (now with Yogurt?) or Dove. Are you Zestfully clean? Or perhaps you smell like an Irish Spring.

We like our clothes to come out of the dryer smelling “fresh,” and add scented dryer sheets to help the process. I guess it helps to cancel out the fragrances used in the laundry detergent that we wash the clothes in. I was bathed in the fragrance of dryer sheets for about 30 seconds the other night as I rode my bike home from work and it seemed that everyone for a couple of blocks was venting their clothes dryer directly into my nostrils. I think I’ll start wearing an oxygen tank.

As my mother (age 93, bless her) grows older, her tolerance for fragrances lessens. I think I inherited those genes, as I find myself being olfactorily offended with greater frequency. When I enter a room in our home or at school that has been recently cleaned, my first hint that this has been done comes via my honker. And increasingly I find it to be an unpleasant experience.

It seems to me that equating the smell of “clean” with anything remotely associated with the fragrances added to cleaning products is disingenuous. A clean room should have the absence of artificial smells. And forget about products that claim to mimic the smell of the “fresh outdoors,” such as Bounce fabric sheets. If I want my clothes to smell like the fresh outdoors, then perhaps I should line dry them in the fresh outdoors. Except that my fresh outdoors is right next to a heavily traveled street that smells more like car exhaust. Maybe I should invent a dryer sheet that smells like diesel fumes for those people living in rural areas who want to smell like the fresh air of the city.

I’m hoping that web 4.0 will sites where you get a whiff of an aroma along with 3D holographic video and tactile feedback. Imagine the possibilities for services such as Facebook (Dude! Don’t breathe on me!), Moodle (I think I could smell alcohol on the teacher’s breath today), Google (search by scent), OpenTable (smell what’s cooking tonight), Travelocity (inhale the cool salt air), Web MD (what does gangrene smells like?), YouTube (fart gross out)… You smell the picture.

But I digress.

The point I set out to make is that clean, for me, has no smell, aside from that of the natural smell of the thing itself. And when we begin to equate artificial fragrances with “clean,” I smell a rat. (Not that I’ve personally smelled one lately.) I suspect our planet will smell a lot worse before it gets better. But when it is better, I trust that it will smell, you know, “clean.”

The last book I read in 2008, and my first one to review for 2009, is likely to get the prize for the most verbose title of the year: Tony Wagner’s The Global Achievment Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don’t Teach the New Survival Skills our Children needs – And What We Can Do About It (Amazon Citation). Nevertheless it’s a great read, and a fitting companion to the current hit and still my favorite book for 2008, Disrupting Class.

Wagner had me hooked in the Preface, when he states “One of my biggest concerns is that most high school educators do not feel any urgency for change…. The result is that course curricula and teaching practices have remained pretty much the same for fifty years or more.” Amen to that, brother Tony. In fact, it seems that far too many educators eschew any sense of urgency or, alas, even excitement, joy, or energy in their teaching. Change? Fuggadaboutit!

But perhaps schools are not changing because “there is no consensus about what type of changes are needed or might work.”  Wagner sets out to discover what those changes might be, and his book might enable educators to  come to consensus, at least within their community, as to next steps.

The genesis of Wagner’s book can be traced to another seminal work of the last decade, Tom Friedmans’ The World is Flat, and the challenge that developing nations pose to U.S. workers as more and more work is exported from America to take advantage of lower wages and eager workers overseas. Wagner laments that while the world has changed, schools have not. And most of the leaders who might be able to do something about it are limited by our “past experience [which] still shapes how we think about school.” We have a hard time imaging anything different, because all of our experiences have had a homogenized, factory model sameness about them since the early 1900s.

So what does Wagner advocate, and from whom does he seek guidance about what we should be doing? Turns out that he speaks to a lot of people outside of traditional U.S. K-12 education: business people, international educators, college professors and administrators. And he finds a surprising amount of consensus abut what is needed, which he distills into seven “survival skills:”

1. Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
2. Collaboration Across Networks and Leading by Influence
3. Agility and Adaptability
4. Initiative and Entrepreneurialism
5. Effective Oral and Written Communication
6. Accessing and Analyzing Information
7. Curiosity and Imagination

Not exactly the Three Rs. Nor will you find these items as part of NCLB. Ditto for standardized achievement tests or college entrance exams. But he believes they are the key to the future of American education. And he sets out to tell us how we might effect such a change.

Part of the challenge is to help us redefine what is meant by academic “rigor” and how we assess it. Through case studies, anecdotes, and interviews Wagner lays out a compelling story of how American education got where it is today, and how misguided attempts at school reform have cemented us to the past and put our nation at risk of losing its relevance in both the economic marketplace and the marketplace if ideas, innovation, and democratic ideals.

Wagner points to alternative assessment vehicles as sources of inspiration and urgency to help us discover ways of testing student’s abilities to demonstrate academic rigor and mastery of the seven survival skills. Such assessments as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) and it partner the College and Work Readiness Assessment (CWRA), and the ISKills Test.

But you say, what about AP courses and AP Exams? Surely they must provide relevant assessment results. “Advanced Placement Courses have grown rapidly in populatiry—in part, perhaps, because they appear to be the only way to increase the level of rigor in high school classes,” says Wagner. And he cites research form colleges that indicates that “success on AP exams is not a good predictor of success in comparable college courses.”

Wagner says that for education to become more than a “profession without a practice” characterized by “random acts of excellence” and “Reform Du Jour,” it will require “reinventing the teaching profession.” He calls on teachers and administrators to end the isolation of teaching and begin visiting one another classrooms as a step in the right direction. So is videotaping of lessons for later review with colleagues, portfolio assessment, mentoring programs and reduced teaching loads for new teachers, and replacing Ed.D. degrees with “M.B.A.’s for school administrators”—ditching most of the required coursework in school of education graduate degree programs. Among the surprising (to me) models for schools that are doing this right are DOD (Department of Defense) schools.

Reinventing the education profession is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the needed changes, however. We must also know how to motivate “today’s students, and tomorrow’s workers.” T0 do this, we need to understand today’s students and embrace how they are different from us. One measure of their difference is their facility with digital media. He cites the work of John Seely Brown who says that “Navigation may well be the main form of literacy for the 21st Century.” And we’re not talking about coloring in maps here, folks, but “learning through multimedia and connection to others, learning as discovery, and learning by creating.”

Wagner closes with compelling stories from several model schools:

• High Tech High in San Diego,
• The Met network of schools in Providence Rhode Island, and
• The Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School in Devens, Massachusetts.

The stories of these schools have been told before, but are great reading.

The only sour note for me in the entire book was Wagner’s suggestion that professional educators associations such as NCTE, NSTA, and NCSS must define what it means to be literate in their disciplines. I think relying on them is overly optimistic. In my view such “learned societies” are hopelessly out-of-touch with the kind of challenges Wagner so vividly describes in his book. Time will tell, I guess.

As mentioned in my introduction, this book makes a wonderful companion piece to Disrupting Class and may be a less provocative way to initiate conversations with colleagues, parents, board members and others in your community about the future of education and the urgency to act now. A great book. Read it. Now.

Colleague Matt Montagne sent me a link to a great NPR interview with one of the most reasoned voices on the topic copyright that I have had the pleasure to meet: Lawrence Lessig, Stanford University Law Professor and founder of Creative Commons. (My blog is licensed under Creative Commons). Anyone interested in copyright  should listen to this guy!

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98591002

As a disciple and (I hope) practitioner of continuous improvement I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. But I know many people do, and if it helps them become better, I say go for it.

So in keeping with the season, I started thinking about the word “resolution.” I had never realized how many different ways the word is used.

(1) There is, of course, the meaning that is top of minds this time of year of “a firm decision to do or not something.”* It’s interesting that it’s the decision that’s important in this definition, not the actual results. Naturally, there is a web site devoted to New Year’s Resolutions.

(2) There’s also a more legalistic meaning of resolution ascribed to legislative bodies when they pass a resolution to make “a formal expression of opinion or intention.” For example, there’s House Resolution 117, “Honoring the contributions of Barbaro to the Commonwealths of Kentucky and Pennsylvania and to America’s horseracing industry.” (Barbaro was a horse but, apparently, not just any horse. The U.S. Government says so!)

(3) As a techie, I care a lot about resolution, as in the number of pixels on a computer display. The higher the resolution, the better the picture. Or so goes the argument. We’re reaching the point where TV resolutions are approaching the threshold where the human eye won’t be able to tell the difference anymore. I guess the resolution of our eyeballs have an upper limit.

(4) There’s a lot of the talk about the problems that President-Elect Obama is facing, and how he must bring “resolution” to them. All of them. Now. Though everybody wants their particular issue to have a successful resolution, they want their definition of success to prevail. Good luck. Sometimes the best resolutions are those which no one party fully likes.

(5) In medicine, doctors talk resolution as the “disappearance of inflammation, or of any other symptoms or conditions.” Inflammation is linked to so many diseases and disease risk factors I wish I could have some resolution in this area myself.

(6) Musicians use resolution to describe “the passing of discord into concord during the course of changing harmony.” Maybe this is what we mean when we say we need to  “get us all on the same page.” I always felt that expression referred to the same musical page, but perhaps it’s derivation is different than that. But certainly singing from different pages of the songbook has a great chance of being discordant. Here’s a short video demonstrating resolution playing a jazz saxophone.

(7) Linguists use resolution to mean the “substitution of two short syllables for a long one.” I found a completely indecipherable study that seems to be about such resolution entitled “Prosodic resolution of a syntactic ambiguity in Korean learners of English.” If anyone can translate this for me, please drop a comment here. I need resolution.

(8) Perhaps out of fear of appearing irresolute, scientists have there own definitions of resolution. Chemists use it to describe “the process of reducing or separating something into its components.” To apply this to our previous example with Mr. Obama, I guess it means that he may need to separate the many problems into smaller ones he is facing before he can work on them, meaning that resolution leads to further resolution. Makes sense, but seems likely to be an endless task.

(9) Physics was always my toughest subject in high school. I mean, particles that can be in two places at the same time? I just don’t get this quantum stuff. But anyway, in physics resolutions means “the replacing of a single force or other vector quantity by two or more jointly equivalent to it.” I need a little help here. Comments anyone?

Following the physics definition, the dictionary says: “the conversion of something abstract into another form.” Perhaps they don’t understand physics, either.

So there you have it. Nine meanings of “resolution.” Which one is most pertinent to your meaning of “resolution” for the New Year?

We know that the Beatles were already tuned into the multiplicity of these meanings with with their song – ahem – Resolution #9.

*All definitions are from the New Oxford American Dictionary.