Hard policy questions about student blogging

A question for you: Should all student blogging be moderated?

I am really conflicted about this. I believe strongly in the benefits of student blogging. I think that if blogging is done in a closed (non-public) environment, it isn't really blogging and doesn't have the benefits of writing for an authentic audience.

In general, I think that teaching students to be responsible is a far better approach than trying to block or filter everything that might be dangerous. We should more time talking about 21st century skills and how to act prudently in the world that is out there.

On the other hand, I understand concerns about student online safety. There are many more subtle issues than just a concern that students might write something inappropriate.

Also when making a district-level decision about blogging policy, the feelings of the administration, board, and community need to be considered. Or do they? Is this a cop-out? This has been keeping me up nights.

I hope the edublogging community will write about these issues and post links to their thoughts. here. These are not easy issues, and I am looking for some thoughtful discussion on them.

Student blogging - working through the sticky issues

I spend a lot of time talking to people about the benefits of blogging. Students writing for a real audience and purpose leads to better writing, more motivation, critical thinking, collaboration, yada yada.

However, there are some admittedly sticky issues around student blogging. This week I had a chance to work through some of these in collaboration with a progressive district that is encouraging teachers and students to use blogs and other Web 2.0 technologies to develop literacy and critical thinking skills. Some of the issues we're talking about are:

• How do you set up student accounts without having student email accounts?
• If you want students to go beyond commenting on teacher posts to creating their own posts or even hosting their own blogs, how can that be monitored?

Many of the common blogging tools don't really address these issues. I'm a big fan of WordPress, so I started there. WordPress.com (they host) requires a valid and unique email address to get an account. WordPress.org (you host) will accept a bogus email account, but it's a hassle to have a large number of blogs on it. On either of these, if a student is administering their own blog, there is no automated way to see their work.

Some other popular blogging services (e.g. Blogger) are blocked in many schools, making their use less than optimal. Other blogging services that strive to be safe for students (e.g. Class Blogmeister) limit administration and primary authorship to teachers. Others charge a fee. Some school blogging platforms that are free aren't open source, meaning that they may or may not be free or even available next week. Other free services are less than reliable in terms of being up 24/7.

In the course of all this, we looked at WordPress MU, the multi-user version of WordPress. This works like Wordpress.com in that any registered user can create a new blog easily on the fly. (This works by setting up a domain with a wildcard, for example, *.blog.someschool.edu. Then if a student creates a blog, it becomes jsmith.blog.someschool.edu.) And the administrator can easily monitor and manage all blogs under the domain. The only drawback is that you have to host it yourself, but it really isn't very difficult. You just need a box with Apache, MySQL and PHP.

The interface is very slick. It has all the things I love about WordPress plus a whole suite of useful admin tools.


I'll post some updates as we get into using this more.

(Sidenote on student email: A pretty usable workaround on this is the Gmail trick. If your teacher gmail account is ksmithteacher@gmail.com and a student uses the email address ksmithteacher+kjonesstudent@gmail.com, all email to that address will go to you at ksmithteacher@gmail.com. That allows you to register students for services that require a unique and valid email without maintaining or needing to monitor an email account for them.)

Using Mobile Tech in Seattle

For those of you in my session "Using Mobile Technology to Differentiate Instruction," here are the links to the cell phone stuff we did:

Photo blogging from a cell phone

Audio blogging from a cell phone

Polling via text messaging

And here are the results of the survey:

NSBA-"Explore ways in which [you] could use social networking for educational purposes"

Kudos to the NSBA for a forthcoming report that urges schools to relax restrictions on the use social networking technologies at schools.

It's about time that educational policymakers (and politicians) recognize that these technologies are important tools for differentiating instruction, engaging students, and developing important new (and old) literacy skills.

Internet blocking - help me understand

I've been thinking about Internet filtering and blocking in schools, trying to puzzle through the shades of gray and understand how current policies in this area can seem like a good idea to anyone.

I understand that filtering is mandated by law. At one extreme, most people can probably agree that blocking access to pornographic sites is a good idea. At the other extreme, we can (hopefully) all agree that blocking access to all Internet is a bad idea.

In between there are a lot of gray areas. Here are some questions that I think are worth some thought and discussion:

- Who should make the decisions about what is blocked? The federal government, the state, districts, schools, or individual parents?
- Are there any filtering systems that kids can't get around?
- Should general tools (blogging sites, wikis, video sharing sites, nings, etc.) be blocked across the board, even though they may host some sites that are potentially objectionable?
- If we start blocking tools like this, doesn't that logically lead to blocking most or all Internet sites? (How about paper and pencils? These too are tools that can be used to create objectionable content.)
- Can technology be used more intelligently to filter?
- What treasures are we depriving students of by blocking sites that don't even have objectionable content? (Is this a technological challenge or a human decision?)
- Where are the respective borders of responsibility and censorship?
- What message are we sending students with our filtering policies?

I'm really trying to see both sides of this issue, but I guess my bias is showing. Please comment on this post. I'm especially interesting is heaving from anyone who could explain any possible rationale for blocking things like Blogger statewide. (Of course, if you live in one of those states, I guess you won't be able to post a comment anyway. Sigh...)