Technology in Education - Part Three
| July 27, 2004 @ 7:00 pm | Filed under Education |
Will Richardson posted to his weblog, Weblogg-ed, about the topic of K-12 Weblogs and Security. He stated:
First, let me say that these issues are ones that we’ve spent a lot of time discussing and debating. The last thing that we want, obviously, is to put our students at risk as they work more transparently and publish to a wider audience. Even though (knock wood) we’ve not had one problem in the hundreds of student Weblogs that we have created here, parents are legitimately concerned about the potential abuses.
Will Richardson :: Author of Weblogg-ed.com
Security is an issue that I am planning on including in my paper on technology in education. Security is a real issue that needs to be addressed in order to make technology a success in a learning atmosphere. As Mr. Richardson points out, it is especially important in the K-12 schools because the students are all minors and would need to have their parent’s approval before the student could use weblogs or other online publishing tools.
Now the question comes up, “What do we do if a parent does not approve?”. Something Mr. Richardson says is to block the public from seeing what the students are publishing. He mentions how Manila has an “Editor’s Only” option where a teacher can assign access to certain students. Do other programs provide the same kind of options? I looked at MovableType and I can’t tell if they support this feature or not. MovableType supports multiple authors but I have not found a way to block the weblog from anyone other than the “editors”.
An important security measure would have to be the teachers being responsible for checking their student’s entries frequently to make sure that the students are not using the system in any kind of inappropriate manner. If we cannot get the teachers to do their part effectively there is already a break down in the system. How easy would it be to get teachers to monitor the content on a regular basis? This was another point which Mr. Richardson pointed out.
These are just some of the questions that I hope to continue to answer as I research this topic.