Authentic Doing in Education

At Urban we do not block these sites nor have any plan to do such. There is no question that a large number of our students—perhaps the majority—maintain pages on journaling sites, but our policies are clear within the classroom and we try to protect our students limited amount of free time. To us it comes down to a few questions:

Is the activity interfering in the classroom (including AIM, games, etc)?
We treat this like any distraction issue that needs to be monitored and controlled by teachers. Attentive students are not accessing MySpace, surfing the web, reading comics or passing notes to each other.

Is the activity illegal?
Thus we block filesharing services that are used predominantly for illegal copyright sharing.

Does the activity violate our acceptable use policy?
In this case, this is similar to prohibiting access to pornography and other types of inappropriate sites, of which we prohibit, but do not physically block access. We can periodically monitor for violations. This is in the realm of building trust, developing a sense of responsibility, and the practicalities of the negative impact of filtering. In terms of journaling sites, we will not judge—carte blanche—that student use of MySpace is inappropriate, but rather we strive to help students exercise good judgement.

All that said, online journaling is a cultural phenomenon that will not be extinguished by banning it’s use. We are deeply interested and involved in this and other related issues. We are a small independent school where deep secrets generally rise to the surface rapidly. If students are using journaling sites to attack other students or teachers, we generally find out and are able to deal with these issues. Students for the most part self-supervise—in part, I believe—due to their enormous access to communication tools via their laptops, school online conferences, and an ingrained habit of online communication at Urban. In other words, they get a lot of practice under the eyes of adults WITHIN the schools electronic systems, and therefore, perhaps they take this with them a tad bit more when venturing outside in areas where the school has no direct control.