Kaos and Control

The second session I attended at this conference was a workshop exploring the level of control (Internet filtering, access to phones and other devices etc) and the consequences for the classroom and beyond . There seem to be as many approaches as there are schools. It returns us to the basic questions about how much structure you put around students to enable/encourage/expect/demand appropriate behaviors. The preferred approach needs to link in to the (changing) culture of the entire school community. My thinking on this tends more toward an “open access” approach where the students have to take more responsibility for managing their own appropriate use of ICTresources. BUT, this has to be achieved through a carefully negotiated social contract involving parents, students and the school within the broader social/legal framework we operate in. Do you help students learn appropriate behavours by filtering out innapropriate ones during school hours? Or are you just displacing the problems so that they occur elsewhere? I can hear these questions echoing through centuries of education.

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