I have to be really careful here. During my work week I exchange hats on a regular basis. Some of the time I am teacher who wants access now … and then I am technician with lofty views about security … and then I am subverter – I want to get to XXX.co.nz because … I want to …

So who does own your school network? I thought about this question last week when a cluster school couldn’t access a Wikispace or a Zoho Creator database. Their inability to access these sites was only half of the problem though. They had to contact an external technican to have the sites removed from the filtering list.

The network is more than just the internet connection though. It’s also the school’s intranet and it’s also the individual computers and other gear. So who “owns” all of this? And what about the school’s website? Who does it all belong to?

I found this page of Ten Commandments from the Rotorua Education Centre and thought about the networks that I own / manage / work in / attempt to work in. It’s a fairly decent look at what expections a school IT person might have. It also looks at the expectations that a teacher might have about their school laptop. The problem is that the page misses out the other side of the issue. If you are going to use the network you need to be aware of the importance of looking after it. That means being sensitive about passwords and shared network spaces. It means being thoughtful about where you put your 13Gb video file (it’s true – I saw one on a server last week) and it means understanding about quotas (I saw a whole school network brought to a standstill last year when someone tried to synchronise 4Gb of photos and movies over a wireless connection because her son said she should!).

So what’s the answer? I think we need to stop thinking about school laptops and computers in terms of home machines. While they are similar beasts their function puts them in a different cage altogether. I think we need to look at using technicians with an educational background (easier said than done) and we need to think about giving more information to the very people who the network matters most to – the end user.

With this in mind, here’s a brilliant site to download a movie that could just help older kids and teachers understand a little bit more about the connected part of the network. Warriors of the Net is a few years old now (1999) but it does explain a bit about networks and how information is transported around the building and around the world.

No related posts.

In A closed mind about an open world James Boyle looks at our response to knowledge networks.

It is not that openness is always right. Rather, it is that we need a balance between open and closed, owned and free, and we are systematically likely to get the balance wrong. Partly this is because we still do not understand the kind of property that exists on networks. Most of our experience is with tangible property; fields that can be overgrazed if outsiders cannot be excluded. For that kind of property, control makes more sense. We still do not intuitively grasp the kind of property that cannot be exhausted by overuse (think of a piece of software) and that can become more valuable to us the more it is used by others (think of a communications standard). There the threats are different, but so are the opportunities for productive sharing. Our intuitions, policies and business models misidentify both. Like astronauts brought up in gravity, our reflexes are poorly suited for free fall.

And on a similar subject (well sort of):

The Digital Learning Challenge: Obstacles to Educational Uses of Copyrighted Material in the Digital Age

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has released a CC licensed white paper about the copyright difficulties faced by educators.

While the primary task of the foundational white paper was to identify these obstacles, the paper concludes with some discussion of paths toward reform that might improve the situation. It suggests that certain types of legal reform, technological improvements in the rights clearance process, educator agreement on best practices, and increased use of open access distribution would help overcome the obstacles we identified.

via Will Richardson
Be aware, of course that New Zealand does not (yet?) enjoy the same fair use provisions as other countries.

The Copyright Act, 1994.
A Readers Digest type summary of NZ Copyright Law from Consumer
A review of teacher’s copyrights from Mark Treadwell

Related posts:

1. Linkeracy – 16th August 2006
2. Linkeracy – 19th August 2006
3. Linkeracy – 26th August 2006

And my new design. Currently it’s Coffee Cup from Zenith. It’s got the left hand side bar and seems to be easy to customise. Here’s hoping!

Related posts:

1. Moving On