Techlearning blog

Ben Wilkoff's students were engaged in some wiki projects online when they began collaborating with with a class in Connecticut (Ben is a teacher in Canada). The students were excited about the collaboration and began to create their own spaces to communicate. "Daily, I would have students come up to me and tell me about a conversation that they were having with a middle schooler on the other side of the continent "

A parent visited the website and logged a complaint to the Attorney General. Among the reasons for the complaint were photos of students placed on a map, students describing their physical features, photos of the school being shared, and a comment by the teacher about MySpace that the parent believed encouraged the students to register there.

The students were removed completely from the wikis that they had been using.

You can read the full story here, but you'll have to read the original post as well as the 30 comments that follow it. And you should also read the other poststhat have been written about it already.

Ben wondered who had failed.

"Was it the teacher who didn’t set up enough rules and guidelines for the students that were written down? Was it the parent who failed to work with the teacher and understand the nature of the collaboration? Or, was it the students who couldn’t grasp the public nature of the internet?"

The parent was concerned for her child's safety. I can't fault a parent for that, even though I do believe she should have communicated with the teacher first. I can't fault the students either. They're middle school students that have the judgment of a middle school student. They make mistakes and it's our job to teach them what to do when that happens.

I believe the school failed the students. Instead of using this as a teachable moment, an opportunity to teach the students a valuable lesson about internet safety and protecting their identity, all in a supervised environment, they have put students into a situation where they are being denied the opportunity to continue collaborating with others due to ignorance.

Since then, the students have decided to continue their collaborations. The teacher in Connecticut commented

Of course, just like everything else that gets banned, the wikis went underground. More kids created their own wikis in response to this than they did while my class wiki was active. So now instead of one wiki in with the whole team involved(not to mention me), there are now many wikis splintered across the wikiverse.

The situation is ludicrous. Students who are engaged in their education being barred from doing so by the school. Instead, they're continuing the same actions without any sort of supervision at all. What sort of message is the school sending to these students?

One of the students involved commented:

... this seemed to sends the message of “You’re too stupid to use the Internet without getting into trouble. We care about parents’ concerns more than we care about your learning.” ... It just leads a lot of people to say more and more, “I hate school.”

There's something horribly wrong with school policies, when students have to hide their educational activities from their teachers.