“Books you check out of the library are school property: that doesn’t make it right, or pedagogically correct, for teachers to sit over your shoulder as you read, taking note of which passages you attend to and which ones you ignore. Your notebook may be issued by your school, but that doesn’t make it right, or pedagogically correct for teachers to read every word you write, as you write them, including the words you regret and erase, or tear out of the notebook.”

That doesn’t seem to be within the scope of what the school is doing. They don’t have keyloggers installed, nor are they going over every word written, looking for thoughtcrime. They’re noticing when the kids are screwing around in class and telling them to get back to work, just like a teacher in meatspace does when they catch kids messing around. IM is the equivalent of passing notes in class, and in my schools, they made us stand up in front of the class to read the notes. This school is good natured enough not to do that.

“Classrooms aren’t private spaces, but what you read, what you write, and what you say in a classroom can most certainly be private (and if a classroom precludes this possibility, it’s a terminally bad classroom).”

Sure, things you write most certainly can be private. Your notebook is private. A laptop off the network is private. IMing unencrypted messages using managed, school-owned laptops over the managed school network, especially when the students know that such management exists, is most certainly not. Come on, Cory. You know the difference between secure and insecure communication. Again IM in class is the equivalent of passing notes. Its not private, not secure and not conducive to learning. IM is useful for many things, but learning from lecture is not one of them.

“I’m not talking about students being given the freedom to flaunt all rules and structure.”

Glad to hear that. You just like them to flaunt some rules, then?

“I’m talking about an enforcement regime for rules and structure that is worse that the misbehavior it is supposed to be preventing.”

Please explain how its worse, other than “I don’t like it and it makes me feel icky.”

“The reason we don’t want students to disrupt classes or ignore … because to do wrong will undermine their learning and the learning of their peers.”

Exactly. Which is why I only threatened to kick the disruptive SOTA kids out of my classroom. I’m not interested in order for its own sake, but given the limited amount of time I had, it was necessary in order to teach what I wanted to teach.

“I believe that continuous, invisible, ubiquitous surveillance of your scholarly pursuits is vastly more disruptive than a kid who is disruptive or disrupted by IM or Facebook (as distinct from a kid who uses Facebook or IM as part of her learning).”

I agree. Its antithetical to the very idea of scholastic achievement, intellectual development or scientific discovery to operate under such conditions. However, I don’t believe that this is what the school is doing. In addition, given both my experience teaching high school kids, and having been a high school student myself, I contend that the chance that anyone is using IM, Facebook or MySpace for learning, especially without the teacher’s knowledge, is slim to none.

“Everybody agrees that *some* preventative measures are a step too far — at the outside edge, we wouldn’t sanction gagging kids and chaining them to their desks.

Somewhere between that and allowing kids to do anything and everything that comes into their minds is the right balance of guidance and freedom.”

Not unless you’re cynical enough to really believe that schools are prisons for children. How’s this: Everyone’s on the honor system not to abuse the laptops or network access. The school will periodically check network logs and if someone is found to be breaking the rules without good reason, they get detention and lose their laptop and network access. The freedom is greater, but so are the consequences.

“I believe that arguments about who owns the laptop or what time it is when they’re surveilled are irrelevant to the discussion of whether surveillance is unduly disruptive to learning. For me, the question is: does the constant threat of being covertly and bottomlessly surveilled as you read, write, and converse do more harm than good?

And for me, the answer would assuredly be yes. I predict that I would have gotten vastly less out of my schooling if this had been the norm then.”

Of course it would. We’ve seen too many examples of the effects of such wide-spread surveillance to ever believe otherwise. But YET AGAIN, this is not what the school is doing. The reason why I keep pointing out that the schools own the laptops is because that’s an important point. Computer security people will tell you that using any machine that you don’t control is a really bad idea. You have no control over what kind of crap is installed on, or what’s running in the background. Or do you like to do your online banking using a public terminal at the library? If nothing else, this is a good lesson in security for the students.

Source: www.boingboing.net