Never mind the technology, where’s the learning?

Back in the mid 90s when the internet was still just a possibility for students and educators alike, there were basically two schools of thought. The open approach, and the ‘walled garden’. In providing internet access to schools some advocated that open internet access should be given, with certain safeguards of course, while others saw content corralled into a safe area or ‘walled garden’ provided by the ISP, in which any external sites would be vetted, and ‘drawn in’ if deemed relevant and appropriate. The ‘walled garden’ approach, although provided as a product to schools, did not succeed. Today, it is obvious why not. Sections of the Internet and the world wide web could not be dammed off to create fresh water habitats for the mind, they soon became brackish and then stale.

Yet, as we move from web 1.0 to 2.0, the notion of the ‘walled garden’ still has an attractiveness even for innovative educators. Such attraction is understandable when the pressure on teachers to ensure a safe Internet environment for their students is greater now than it has ever been. There’s been an interesting discussions on the Naace listserv (Naacetalk) this week which buzz around this issue. For example, here’s one response to a contribution on the topic of Google images:

“For those that are unaware, google has two levels of filtering, forget the standard, it makes very little difference but the maximum ‘Strict Filtering’ will cut out over 95% of inappropriate images.”

response:

“It would be interesting to discover if the above action would give teachers, schools and LAs immunity from legal or disciplinary action taken by parents and carers. My own feeling is that 95% is not enough.”

Leon’s comment raised the debate in my view:

I think that the use of image “searches”, especially self-generated, web community based ones like Flickr are highly disruptive technologies, in that, in many cases they encourage children how to derive value from innumerable small contributions and inputs from their peers and like minded communities on the web and also “allow” them to see what others are doing and how they are building creative and exciting new content - it is about user participation and not a static pre-defined resource. Photo repositories are a visual equivalent of Cut and paste in many ways…wouldn’t it be better just to hand pupils a digital camera and get them to upload images via a Learning Platform from home or school - isn’t that so much richer - isn’t it much more relevant? If a school were to have a mechanism whereby the whole community could upload images wouldn’t that be a more involved process - especially if staff and children acted as responsible moderators?

It’s perhaps a natural reaction to look for relatively easy answers to complex situations, to restrict rather than trust, to protect rather than take a risk. To quote from Leon again:

” … people are paying people millions to base businesses on these trends [co-creation in the workplace] and what do schools or authorities do in this country? They lock the door and keep kids in the classroom away from any exciting developments - they lock down and lock out opportunity, risk, innovation and experimentation and have to get permission from the government to innovate. They encourage the bland and the pre-defined; they feel threatened or imagine new threats to maintain and secure their positions as gatekeepers. … These are New Literacies i.e. Media literacies and we need to co-opt not exclude them.”

Establishing ‘walled gardens’ or creating ‘closed communities’ might make us feel more comfortable, but that’s all it is likely to do.

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