Education Networks: who will take responsibility?

Posted on | March 10, 2009 | 7 Comments

Ewan called it incompetence. I have some sympathy for that view and for the evident anger behind the view. Ewan was talking specifically about the top-down, heavy-handed approach to web filtering still practised by some local education authorities in Scotland (and by many schools’ systems worldwide). He wrote, in response to the blacklisting of the wonderful thinkuknow site by a local authority:

….this is, or borders on, incompetence. At the very least it’s lazy. This is the kind of mistake that shows a systemic lapse in our education establishment’s ability to encourage informed and proactive actions from those in educational and technology management. At the very least, I’d like to see that someone, somewhere in the strata of Scottish education management cares enough to make this a rather more public case study of how not to operate. It’s only from errors like this that others can learn, after all.

But the issue raised by Ewan is just one singularly stupid example of the wider approach to web and network security still taken by some parts of Scottish education, an approach that, if not incompetent, is at the very least ineffective, counter-productive and based on a model that might suit a corporate environment (although even that is very open to question) but most certainly does not meet the needs of an education network.

I met with an example of just this kind of thinking today. I was kindly invited to go into a primary schoool in a local authority very close to home to give the staff (of that school and of a neighbouring school) some insight into how they might make use of online collaborative tools such as Wikispaces and Google Docs. I prepared a few nice examples of work done in both of these environments by teachers from around the world (thanks to a request for ideas on Twitter), and set up a simple walk-through to show the basics of both sets of tools.

I arrived with my Mac at the ready and brought up the wireless network, which asked for a WEP password. The school assistant called the authority’s helpline to ask for the password, and was told it could not be given out ‘due to licencing issues’. We then called the technical support person linked to the school and I spoke to him myself. He was very polite. The answer was a straight ‘no’. I explained that I was in the school to lead some professional development for the staff. The answer was still no. I asked him the reason for his refusal. He quoted ‘policy’ and thought that was the end of it, but I asked him to try to justify a policy that basically said that the local authority in question do not trust the competence of their own professional education staff, including the headteacher of the school I was visiting, to decide that someone should be able to put his laptop onto the network.

The only solution, it seemed, was to use one of the laptops already in the school, which were set up to join the network automatically. He advised me to use a pen drive to transfer my bookmarks to the school laptop (I could not be bothered to explain that my ‘bookmarks’ were on delicious.com). I asked him why allowing me to transfer material from my laptop to a school laptop was deemed any more secure than simply using my own laptop. He had no answer.

To be fair to the young man I was speaking to, he had no choice but to quote policy at me and to refuse to permit a fellow professional onto the network for an hour or so for the benefit of the school’s teachers. To his credit, he remained friendly and polite throughout our brief conversation, despite my pointed questioning and my self-evident irritation at the stupidity of the policy he was forced to follow.

So, is this an example of incompetence, or is it simple indifference on the part of the matrix of local politicians and officials in various parts of local government who allow this to happen? It is certainly a product of ignorance and an unwillingness (or an inability) of these people to seek to define fully and properly what an education network is really for. At the Scottish Learning Festival in September last year, Fiona Hyslop, education secretary in the Scottish Government, dodged a question on this very subject from Neil Winton, offering the crass cop-out that such issues were ‘an operational matter’. She was wrong – this is an issue of culture, of a deep mistrust of the professionalism of teachers, of a profound misunderstanding of the uses to which schools, teachers and learners should be able to put the networks they inhabit. It is a national issue, and one that therefore deserves to be discussed and debated openly at national level.

I have quoted Tommy Lawson, Education ICT lead for Midlothian Council, before. He once told me:

…a schools’ network should be built on the premise that it must be as insecure as we can get away with rather than as secure as we can make it.

Of course, those who continue to restrict professional and proper educational use of networks in the name of some spurious definition of security and safety will simply not understand what Tommy meant by that statement. It is beyond their ken. But more and more education professionals across the country, and across the world, are starting to question this unthinking, ignorant and, in some cases, possibly even incompetent approach to networked learning. Even within Scotland, the gulf between those authorities that are genuinely trying to think through the needs of teachers and learners in networking terms, and many are already implementing enlightened and flexible policies in this area, and the authorities that are still tied to the corporatist, restrictive model is widening every day. The teachers, and more importantly, the pupils in the schools of such authorities are being atrociously served by such policies.

Postscript – the session itself eventually went very well and both schools involved are hoping to get involved in making use of these and other collaborative tools in the coming weeks and months. I’ll be happy to continue to help them whenever I am asked.

Technorati Tags: education, networks, security, trust, professionalism, indifference

Category: architecture, children, education, enlightenment, ict, internet, learning, network learning, networks, safety, teaching, technology, trust

Comments

7 Responses to “Education Networks: who will take responsibility?”

Jaye Richards
March 10th, 2009 @ 10:39 pm

You’d have been given a log-on code for you laptop in my school John. My LA, surprisingly has just become much more open to dialogue about it’s network and made some very progressive changes, including allowing students access to the network on mobile devices. It did take some negotiation, but a change at the top appears to have ushered in a new era of the dog actually wagging it’s tail. I was actually asked what it was I needed in school to help me with my work !

Small signs of changes to come nationwide I hope….
Adam Sutcliffe
March 11th, 2009 @ 1:18 pm

Great post John.
I’ve been an active participant in the blogosphere since only 2006, but some of the first posts I ever read dealt with this issue. For whatever reason we don’t seem to be getting any further (generally, chapeau to Jaye’s LA.)
In my school for instance I can’t hook my laptop to the network because (sharp intake of breath) it’s a Mac and the God’s of RM won’t allow it.
A couple of months ago I got one of my classes to sign up to animoto and produce some vids. Guess what? It’s now blocked.
No one seems to know who is in charge of filtering? Where is the policy? Where is the consultation?
Joe Wilson
March 11th, 2009 @ 1:26 pm

Time to really ask who are these sic dugs
http://www.joecar.demon.co.uk/2008/05/little-britain-carol-sketch.html

Becta has number of frameworks setting out what is expected from School networks – JISC have similar for FE and HE.

We surely should have one in Scotland and it should be part of HMIE framework and promoted by agencies that depend on its operations in Schools I’d include SQA , LTScotland , Skills Development Scotland and perhaps some others who have stake in making this work – how many schools can access Holyrood coverage on You Tube for example

I don’t think there is wilful incompetence, just lack of leadership and support in this space . Filtering decisions should be sensible , justifiable and done to meet needs of learners and teachers.

It is a global issue but we should be able to sort it quickly in a wee friendly place like Scotland
Ewan McIntosh
March 12th, 2009 @ 8:42 am

In my corporate environment very little is blocked. If we have valid reason, though I’ve not found one yet, we can consult hate sites, pornography and other such profanities in order to carry out the research required for some of the hard-hitting learning products we want to make. We’re told what we need to do before we consult such sites, we have a policy we’re trusted to follow. We are treated as professionals from day one (even when, like me, you’re new to the Channel).

I feel that you touch on it with the SLF story – the fact that this is a cultural issue (i.e. they don’t understand or know about participation culture, collaborative working and therefore feel it’s something someone else should deal with) is not appreciated.

Petitioning time for MSPs and MPs? I feel a campaign somewhere in there.
Neil Livesey
March 12th, 2009 @ 3:35 pm

Many years ago there were no restriction to Internet access. I should know I was Adviser in Computing and IT for Lothian at the time and the Internet was in its infancy. I remember to this day being approach by an adviser from Guidance who had attended a police briefing on offensive material found on the world wide web. In her opinion we should be banning the use of modems in school until we sorted this issue out. Sound familiar?

Some 18 years later we still have the same issues but we’ve failed to tackle the underlying problem. Learners need to be educated in the use of online technology and taught what is appropriate and inappropriate behavior when using this technology.

Restricting access to sites serves very little purpose when learners can go home to their own (unrestricted) computers and do what ever they like. By informing and educating people to the dangers of the Internet we are more likely to responsible usage. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t filter inappropriate content – we still need to do this but we do need to have a more flexible approach to social networking sites and adopting a “white list” approach rather than a “blacklist” one that pervades at the moment.

You don’t need to look too far inside your crystal ball and you will see flood wireless networks with devices being able to access WiFi wherever you are. This already exists in certain towns and cities. How will you stop learners using their mobile WiFi devices accessing and browsing these networks when attending school? How will you know if they’ve linked to your secure WiFi network, fully locked down and often unuseable or the unsecure one available via their WiFi service provider? Will you now ban these devices because you cannot control what learners are accessing. Better to educate than legislate.

BTW my response to the banning modems in schools was to push for further access to the Internet and make teachers aware of the issues and provide guidance on how they should manage the problem. I didn’t say switch off the modem.
Peter Rafferty
March 12th, 2009 @ 7:31 pm

Your blog post very much sums up my increasingly frustrated thoughts towards my local authority. “They shall not pass” appears to be the motto and “they” do not. There is an almost endless list of things we are not allowed to use but the icing on the cake was the refusal to allow in school access of our online assessment, tracking and reporting software, Incerts. The unblocking of this was completed in a very grudging manner.

Your own experience of leading CPD echoes very closely a number of episodes within our own school. Demonstrating del.icio.us was impossible to agree with the LEA because if the word delicious is typed into search engines you get some “delicious” images …apparently.
Keep up the good work.
Ray Tolley
March 14th, 2009 @ 11:02 am

The problem of allowing staff, or even students, to access the school’s network using a laptop is not new. I remember having to overcome this issue some 10 years ago.

The refusal to grant ‘permissions’ to additional machines is either as others have said one of a failure to understand modern Teaching & Learning strategies or, more probably, one of downright laziness by technicians.

It is quite easy to add permissions by identifying the unique ID of each machine. I believe this to be a reasonable solution when other ’strangers’ may have access to the site through evening classes etc.