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August 1, 2001
Web Publishing Policy
By David Warlick
Publishing a school Web site is very much like opening the doors of your building and your classrooms to anyone who wants to visit. So it is important to plan carefully and to establish goals that you want to accomplish through your Web site. Establishing a school or school district Web site involves many considerations. The inherent benefits are enormous, but the potential for problems is nearly as significant.
In the same way that you control the physical environments of your school(s) in order to assure that effective learning takes place, you must also control your Web presence to assure that your goals are achieved and that distracting problems do not result. Thus, it is important to establish a Web Publishing Policy (WPP) that spells out exactly how your Web site will be accomplished, maintained, and why. The following sections describe issues that need addressed to assure quality, value, and protection in your Web communication endeavors.
Why
Your WPP should include a statement of your goals--what you want to achieve as a result of publishing your Web site. This can take the form of a mission statement or a list of goals and/or objectives. These goals should be described very clearly but they should also be broad enough so as not to constrain schools and educators from being creative.
The best goals are behavioral and describe how you want to affect the behavior of your information customers. They begin with the question, "How can my school's stakeholders help me do my job?" The answer to this question will lead you to your Web publishing goals.
What
What you will publish on your school or district Web site and the features that it will include should also be part of your WPP. The content that will or will not be published should be tied directly to your Web publishing goals, answering the question, "What information do my school's stakeholders need in order to help me do my job?" Your WPP should describe this information clearly, but these guidelines should not be so specific as to constrain creativity.
Security should also be considered. It is important not to publish information that might put educators and especially students at risk. Avoid making any connections between a student's network presence and physical presence. Most WPPs forbid including student addresses and phone numbers. Many prohibit the posting of individual student pictures and names. Once again, these are issues you must address when setting your policies.
It is also essential that you include references to your school or district copyright policy in terms of the intellectual property of the information that will be posted on your site(s). Your Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) should also be referenced. These three documents (WPP, AUP, & Copyright Policy) are interrelated and should all be referenced when establishing clear guidelines for how network communications happen, and the consequences for its abuse.
Who
Traditionally, school and district Web sites have been static in that once the initial pages were posted they were rarely updated, and new pages were added infrequently. Maintaining an active Web site requires considerable staff time to recode HTML files and to construct new ones. However, new Web-based tools are available that facilitate dynamic Web sites where staff can update and add content with little technical training and far less time. Database-driven sites provide the means to establish truly interactive Web services that result in effective goals-based communication between school, home, and community.
Who exactly should be publishing on your Web site and under what conditions? This is an important decision to make and one that must be incorporated into your WPP. Web publishing should be a shared endeavor. In a recent book, The Cluetrain Manifesto , Rick Levine and others make a case for the idea that effective, goals-based Web publishing is about conversation--people are not interested in seeing Web brochures, but want to communicate with others. With this in mind, Web-publishing responsibilities should be dispersed among the staff at your school from whom your stakeholders will want to hear. It is essential, though, that all staff members with Web publishing responsibilities have accepted the goals of the WPP and are aware of what information should and should not be published.
When
The obvious way of considering this issue is determining how often specific features of your Web site will be updated. Certainly, newsletters and calendars should be updated either regularly or as frequently as needed. When such an item is obviously out of date, it has no value to your information customers and is of no help in accomplishing your goals. It also casts doubt over other features of your site as readers wonder how much of the content is out of date.
Another way of looking at the "When" issue is considering under what conditions certain people will be able to publish, or who will have oversight over what will be published on your Web. If a number of people are given the right to add content, then who assumes control over total content quality and when? Your WPP should identify those responsible for generating and posting content as well as the system or path of quality assurance.
How
Typically, updating and adding Web pages is a less than convenient endeavor requiring technical training and maintenance of user accounts. Many schools standardize on a particular Web editing software or Web-based tools so as to streamline support. Others allow their site builders to select and use the HTML tool with which they feel most comfortable. There are also a variety of ways that Web pages can be added to the site, such as FTP, via diskette, through Web forms, and others.
These procedures and standardizations must be described clearly, with appropriate training provided and software (FTP clients and HTML editors) supplied. They should be as convenient as possible for your content people in order to encourage effective maintenance of your site.
Adaptability
The World Wide Web, as most other realms of technology, is a moving target. Tools and techniques change almost daily, along with the technical capacity of our schools and the sophistication of your Internet audience. For this reason, it is essential that you factor into your Web Publishing Policy a timeline and procedure for adapting your policies (including Acceptable Use Policies) to the rapidly changing conditions of your school and its stakeholders.
Conclusion
A school or district Web site should become an integral part of what your organization does as well as a reflection of the culture of your school or district. This goal is accomplished when the project is a community effort and the community is united with clear expectations and procedures.
Email: David Warlick
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