Dangerously Irrelevant

TIES - Can schools regulate cyberbullying, harassment, and social networking?

Yesterday at the TIES conference I had the honor of giving the lunchtime presentation (i.e., I was the only presentation during that time slot). I gave a presentation titled Can Schools Regulate Cyberbullying, Harassment, and Social Networking? I discussed some general legal principles related to off-campus student cyberspeech, highlighted the only six court decisions I can find on this topic, and answered a lot of great questions from the audience.

The materials from this presentation are available on my TIES 2006 web page, including both my PowerPoint slides and the podcast I made of the presentation.

Advising, webcams, and Skype

After meeting with a doctoral student yesterday who drove two hours each way for a one-hour meeting, I decided enough was enough, at least with my own advisees. I made a page on my web site that encourages students to work with me to use technology to solve some typical time / travel / communication challenges.

I then sent a listserv message to the rest of the faculty in my department about my new web page because I thought that some other folks might be interested in doing this too. Within minutes another message appeared on the listserv, this time from our department technology coordinator, notifying us of the University's discouragement of Skype because it hogs resources and acts as a connective node for non-university-related data.

I encourage everyone to read the University of Minnesota recommendations regarding Skype. As I noted to our technology coordinator, the suggestion that Skype be turned off most of the time is somewhat problematic. I understand the U's concern about bearing non-university-related data traffic. That said, I wish the U would think about Skype like it does our telephones, which we obviously don't turn off except when we're expecting a call.

Anyone have any thoughts on this? Experiences and/or policies from your own organization?

RFID chips and schoolkids

Miguel took exception to my ISTE point/counterpoint article on using RFID chips to monitor schoolchildren in school. I knew my stance would be controversial when I wrote the piece, so I'll take this opportunity to respond to Miguel's criticisms. Here's my thinking, using the Brittan Elementary (Sutter, CA) program as an example...

1. There's nothing on the RFID chips except a number. No demographic information. No address information. No personally-identifiable information whatsoever. Nothing except a unique ID number that's meaningful only to the specialized school software that matches kids with attendance records (and, maybe later, lunch records). There's a big difference between the information stored on the kids' RFID cards and what was on the British passports. Anyone who stole the info from the kids' RFID chips literally would get bupkis...
2. We already have to monitor the whereabouts of kids on school grounds at all times. There is no right of students to roam freely. As such, I'll stick by my argument that using technology to do this instead of expensive human personnel is at least arguably defensible.
3. Given #1 and #2, that's why I said that RFID chips as used in Brittan Elementary are a non-issue. They're no more invasive than student IDs (with or without bar codes) or biometric readers for school cafeterias or libraries. They're arguably less invasive than networked security cameras, metal detectors, drug dog sniffs, or extracurricular students' urine testing for illegal substances, all of which are commonplace.
4. Finally, I'm wary of the slippery slope argument that Miguel use ("RFID chips ... are a precedent for using technology in ways that violate our privacy"). If we decide to go down this path, wouldn't we also be against Internet cookies, secure login databases for financial web sites, GPS in cars/cell phones, Internet form-filling software, toll booth passcards, biometric scanners, security cameras, and all of the other technologies I mention in my article? Why is RFID so different than these other technologies?

The students who take my school law courses would tell you that I'm actually a pretty strong privacy advocate. That said, I also recognize that, as technology-using individuals, we make choices every day to sacrifice privacy for convenience. That trend is only going to intensify as the benefits of divulging certain types of information outweigh whatever privacy concerns most folks have.

We need to be careful to protect students' private information from theft and other improper uses. That said, I'm not sure that a meaningless number on a students' RFID chip is the red flag that others make it out to be.

Google for Educators

Google for Educators is a new web site from our friends at Google that puts twelve of its tools together for use by K-12 teachers. The list includes Google Documents (formerly Writely) and Spreadsheets, Blogger, Google Video, and more.

Very cool. Now the question is going to be how many educators are blocked from using some or all of these tools by their districts...

Posting student photos on the Web

As a technology leadership guy who also happens to have a law degree, I often get asked legal questions related to school technologies. Today, at the request of Miguel, I’m going to discuss issues related to posting student photos on the Web. I’ll preface this discussion with my usual caveats that 1) I am not offering legal advice, 2) I am not in an attorney-client relationship with anyone, and 3) I always recommend that folks consult their school district's attorney regarding legal issues.

Pictures taken for school-related purposes

Schools take pictures of students all the time - for yearbooks, at athletic events, in class, at artistic performances, etc. Often they want to post those pictures to the Internet, thus making those photos potentially available to a global audience.

Every school district should have a policy for dealing with student photos. That policy should comply with the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) as well as any relevant state statutes (for example, Minnesota has the Government Data Practices Act).

Schools should solicit parents’ permission to post photos of their child on the Web. The permission form should clearly describe the anticipated ways in which the school will use student pictures. When posting photos, schools should try their utmost not to post accompanying names at all – the next best option probably is to post students’ first names but not last names. Sometimes schools need to post students’ full names – for example, an online feature of the star pitcher on the softball team or the lead actress in the school play – but these situations should be carefully thought out beforehand to minimize parental concerns about student privacy and safety. Parents should be informed of all of the various permutations so that they can make informed choices about when to grant or refuse permission for their child’s photo to be used.

Schools have the difficult obligation to somehow monitor which students’ photos can be used online and which can’t. For example, if a photo taken of a class activity has a student in the background whose parents refused permission, that photo likely can’t be used online, even if the focus of the picture was on other students.

Another dilemma for schools is what to do with parents who don’t return the permission form. Schools basically have two options when this occurs:

• assume they have permission to publish unless parents turn in the form and opt out; or
• assume they do not have permission to publish unless parents turn in the form and opt in.

The latter option is more protective of students and is generally the one I recommend to educators.

Here are some example policies, forms, and other resources related to school use of student pictures:

• Fairfax County (VA) Public Schools
• Beverly Hills (CA) Unified School District
• Columbia (MO) Public Schools

Pictures taken by parents or other guests

In an interesting twist, Miguel and I recently had an exchange about an e-mail he received from a technology coordinator:

A parent has taken photos at school events, primarily athletic events, then posted them on her own personal web site (without permission of the students or parents involved) with prices for purchasing. I know there could be a problem if the students were identified by name but they are not. There are no captions at all.

Our superintendent is out of town. I'm sure someone has encountered this situation. Does anyone know if this is legal?

Here’s my take on the situation: if the pictures were taken in a public place, or in a place where parents / guests had permission to take pictures (e.g., inside school or on school grounds), I believe that parents or guests are legally entitled to take the photos and/or sell them. If a school district wanted, I think it could have a policy prohibiting anyone taking photographs within school buildings or on school grounds, but the enforcement and/or public relations issues would be difficult.

I found some excellent resources on this issue:

• http://tinyurl.com/93e9x
• http://www.krages.com/ThePhotographersRight.pdf

Of course a school district can always request that photographers exhibit some sensitivity to folks' concerns about privacy and safety, particularly since most of the subjects of the photos are minor children.

Conclusion

Obviously the issues surrounding photographs of students on the Web are numerous and complex. The challenge for schools is to balance their (and parents’) desires to publicize the great things that are happening in their organizations with their responsibilities to protect children and to satisfy parental concerns about student privacy and safety. The guidelines described here also would pertain to videos of students, not just photographs.

How does your school organization handle issues related to online publishing of student photos?

This post is also available at the TechLearning blog.

Should schools allow teachers to use outside technology tools?

Miguel Guhlin invited me to be a guest blogger on the TechLearning blog. A couple of days ago I submitted my first post - I will be blogging for TechLearning the third Wednesday of every month. Below is an excerpt and a link to the full post. Thanks for the invite, Miguel!

Should schools allow teachers to use outside technology tools?

I’d like to kick off my guest blogging by raising again an issue I once blogged about long ago. Many educational technology advocates have been blogging about the need to enable teacher and student use of Web 2.0 tools – for example, see these recent posts by Wesley Fryer, David Warlick, Susan Brooks-Young, and Jeff Utecht. While I agree with them, I also want to highlight the essential conundrum that school administrators face: there are rarely ways in which school organizations can effectively monitor the use of many of these tools.

As I said in my long-ago post…

Schools and districts are required, both legally and professionally / ethically / morally, to monitor employee and student use of technology tools when those tools are used for professional or instructional purposes. School organizations that don't must face the legal and public relations ramifications of ignoring potential employee / student abuse of digital technologies. No school system wants to be sued and/or highlighted in the news because it wasn't effectively safeguarding against sexual harassment, cyberbullying, dissemination of inappropriate content (e.g., pornography), etc. via electronic communication channels or online environments.

Some schools and districts are providing rich sets of tools for teachers and students to use for classroom purposes. These tools include e-mail accounts, network folders, web pages, parent portals, online chat, online threaded discussion areas, online whiteboards, online calendars, instant messaging, wikis, blogs, podcasts, and other similar tools. No district, however, is making all of these tools available to all teachers and, indeed, probably never can. The incredible (and burgeoning) diversity of available tools is simply too much for school systems to keep up with, more or less provide.

Many enterprising teachers thus are using (or would like to use) tools provided by entities outside the school organization (such as NiceNet, Yahoo! Groups, Blogger, pbwiki, Flickr, and SchoolNotes) to enhance the classroom experience. These tools typically are not hosted by the school system, however, and there is no ability for administrators to effectively exercise oversight over teachers' and students' appropriate use of these tools. In many instances, school leaders may not even know such tools are being used.

So administrators are essentially in a bind. If they don’t allow usage of these tools, they become fodder for bloggers and other educational technology advocates because they’re failing to tap into the pedagogical potential of these creative technologies and ignoring the future needs of students and society. If they do allow usage of these tools, they run the very real and likely risk of inappropriate usage, including usage that may incur legal liability and significant financial costs for the school organization and the taxpayers that it serves. I think it is important that we not downplay schools’ obligations in this area. Cyberbullying, sexual harassment, and other inappropriate uses of technology are real and frequent occurrences by both students and employees. Schools cannot abdicate their legal and moral responsibility to monitor appropriate usage of technology tools.

As an educator, I desperately want to allow students and teachers to use these wonderful new tools that are external to the school organization. As an attorney, I’m struggling to figure out how to make this happen.

What do you think schools should do to enable student and employee access to these external tools while simultaneously fulfilling their obligation to monitor and protect against abuses? Should administrators just trust that instructional uses of these tools will be okay and deal reactively with lawsuits / parent complaints / financial costs / media feasts as they occur? Since there is no way that school leaders can monitor all of the different tools that are out there on the Web, should schools have a preemptive ban on all non-school-provided tools because monitoring is literally impossible? What would appropriate school policy and/or guidelines look like for these types of tools? Does anyone have a good example of school- or district-level policy language that deals with these issues?

This post is also available at the TechLearning blog.

Launching the Quotes category

I'm a quotes aficionado so I just added a quotes category. I realized that I needed somewhere to capture the poignant phrasing of others and figured this was as good a place as any!

David Warlick, who can turn out a pithy quote with the best of them, gets a double dip to kick us off. Here's the first one...

I also like this one...

We need administrators to be thinking and talking about this stuff!

Online predators: Overblown threat?

Much conversation has occurred in the educational blogging community about DOPA. One of the arguments against DOPA that hasn't popped up that much is the fact that the perceived problem may be largely overblown. While it's obviously important to keep children safe and protect students against online predators, it's also equally important to keep the issue in proper perspective. Consider the following:

• Fewer children are being sexually solicited online than five years ago (see the full report by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, Crimes Against Children Research Center, and the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention)
• Only about one-fifth of online sexual solicitations occur on non-home computers (see p. 18 of the full report; this remaining fifth would include schools, libraries, etc.)
• Students who come across sexual predators and cyberbullies are, for the most part, handling those situations fairly effectively

The numbers aren't uniformly positive, of course. For example:

• About two-thirds of teenagers say that teens do things online that they wouldn't want their parents to know about and nearly 80% of online teens say that teens aren't careful about sharing personal information online (2006, Pew Internet & American Life Project)
• Some teenagers still are engaging in risky behaviors, including talking online about sex with someone they've never met in person, arranging to actually meet someone they only knew online, pretending to be a different person / age online, or never telling their parents that they were solicited by adults online (2005, Polly Klaas Foundation)

The numbers are pretty clear that the proportion of online sexual solicitations that occur during school time is pretty low. This means that DOPA is a solution in search of a problem, with the concurrent effects on positive Internet tool usage and lack of opportunity to teach students about appropriate use that already have been noted.

I highly recommend you check out some of the high-quality work being done by the CCRC, CSRIU, and others. If we're going to hype ourselves up about these issues, we should at least have a solid factual base to undergird our conversations.

A thoughtful response

I was delighted to see Miguel Guhlin's fictional response last week to Anne Davis' draft letter requesting permission to use Flickr in a hypothetical school district. The brilliant part of Miguel's letter was not his reasoned iteration of Flickr's weaknesses. Rather, it was the list of alternatives that Miguel provided that might possibly satisfy both the teacher's desires as well as the district's concerns.

As noted in the comments to Miguel's blog post, most administrators would be hard-pressed to craft such a thoughtful response. Most leaders in formal positions of authority (i.e., superintendents and/or principals) are not familiar enough with technology in general and with Web 2.0 tools specifically. Many of the folks who may have the requisite technology knowledge, such as technology coordinators or CTOs, either don't have enough the educational background to effectively respond to the teacher's instructional concerns or are so busy that they're likely to just dash off a quick note of denial without further explanation.

We need more model communications like this. We also need to expose our school leaders to such models so that they can get a sense of what is out there and how they can effectively and appropriately respond to the technology tool issues that are arising in our schools.

Does anyone know of other exchanges like this one that would be good models for preservice and/or practicing administrators?