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.

Way back in the medieval age of lab-based computing, we banned games and gaming. The logic of such was quite simple: computers were treated as a limited resource and therefore it was an easy argument to enforce academic use only. Stepping forward to the new millennium (5 years later), we shed all prohibitions of use other than those which violate our Use Agreement (generally actions that are illegal). Class time is obviously a different story—this is the teacher’s domain and of course no one allows gaming. I’m not saying it does not happen. How many of us snuck Sports Illustrated—or worse—behind our history textbook during “study periods?” Legislating “attention” rarely works except for those who are already attending.

I’ve led approx 40 tours of visiting educators to Urban who want to see a laptop program in action—many of whom expect to see solo-gaming running rampant—and most leave a bit shocked to realize that relatively few are doing this, even during their break times. The vast majority of our students have games loaded, BUT, then again, the vast majority are serious students whose primary focus is a combination of academics and social interactions and not burying themselves in gaming solitude.

That said, there is an important minority—who tend to be socially awkward male 9th graders—who quickly enter the radar of a slew of adults (techs, teachers, advisors, deans, counselors and parents). This is the power of all our schools: small, personal, independent organizations who excel at knowing their students and building nurturing relationships. Telling students that they can not play games on their personal laptops in their own free time is like legislating against doodling, reading comic books, playing solitaire, writing romance novels, or just daydreaming about rollercoasters.

The role of our adult advisor/mentors is significant for they are likely the better target of discussion on ways to help students mature and move on to natural attentiveness.