when is a blog not a blog and why you shouldnt block one
"Welcome Carnival of Education readers. Here’s what my blog is all about. You might enjoy reading some more of my posts on education, teaching, technology, and math. Thanks for visiting. Now on to the article…
At first, I thought this AP/Indianapolis Star article was going to shed some light on why this blog and my Gmail account were being blocked from the Franklin Township school system. The opening lines:
It took students one day to hack their way back to blogging Web sites after technicians blocked them on school computers. But Fort Wayne Community Schools will keep trying to keep students away from the popular sites, spokeswoman Debbie Morgan told The Journal Gazette for a Sunday story.
School officials say blogging not only distracts students but makes them vulnerable to online predators. “We don’t put all these thousands of dollars of equipment out there in the schools for personal use,” said Doug Coutts, the district’s chief operations officer. “They’re out there for educational purposes.”
So that’s it — school systems are blocking blogs because they’re “distracting” and not “educational”. Well, that’s not very accurate or even correct, but at least it kind of makes sense.But what’s this about “online predators”? Reading on:
Students had been able to log on to popular sites including Facebook and MySpace during school, though they were not supposed to do so. Technicians started blocking the sites Thursday, but students had found ways around the new blocks by Friday. […] School policy prohibits students from accessing their personal e-mail accounts, blog sites such as Facebook and other material the school deems inappropriate.[emph. added]
So here’s the fact-deprived logic at work: Facebook is bad. Facebook is a blog. Therefore blogs are bad. We must block what is bad. Therefore we must block all blogs.
As the Car Talk guys would say, this is a line of reasoning that is unencumbered by the thought process. People of the school corporations: FACEBOOK IS NOT A BLOG. It is a social network web site. If you cannot distinguish between a blog and a regular web site, you need to read up on your terminology; and you certainly should not be setting student policy about blogs if you do not know what one is.
It drives me up the wall when people in position to determine what students can or cannot do in school do so based on confused terminology and an incomplete grasp of the subject. And it REALLY grates on me when such people confuse the format of something with its content – as is the case when the Ft. Wayne school officials summarily dismiss all blogs because they are not “educational”, which they know because, well, they’re blogs. Just like Facebook.
Schools are going to go nowhere fast if they try to solve a problem like this by using blocking software. How many legitimate, educational blogs are being denied to students because some school official won’t take ten minutes of research to figure out the difference between Facebook and Instapundit? Don’t these people have kids, and therefore know that the surest way to get a kid to do something is to tell them they’re not allowed to? Crikey.