Tag Archive for ‘mobile devices’ at dougbelshaw.com

Welcome! If you're new here, you may want to sign up for email updates or subscribe to the RSS feed for all my posts. Alternatively, browse or subscribe by category (look to your right). Thanks for visiting!

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post entitled Towards a Forward-Thinking Acceptable Use Policy for Mobile Devices. To avoid repeating myself, a lot of what I’m going to say here builds upon that post. As a result, you may want to read that first before you start here - or at least remind yourself of it!

No-one ever works in a vacuum, and I don’t think anyone in the history of the world can claim to have had a truly ‘original’ idea. At least not in terms of being the sole agent involved with the idea from scratch. With that in mind, there must have been something brewing in the edublogosphere, as the week after my post seminal blogger David Warlick posted his AUP 2.0. In it, he introduced his School AUP 2.0 wiki, a fantastic resource for anyone wanting/needing to grapple with these issues.

Writing policy documents may seem like a boring or even pointless job, but an up-to-date and meaningful Acceptable Use Policy is crucial to, and underpins, everything we do in terms of educational technology. I’ve mentioned before how my school, like most schools in the UK, has a policy that outright bans students from having their mobile phones in school. Yet, all of them do, and use them blatantly in front of teachers at break and lunchtimes. Some, like myself, have even encouraged students to use their mobile devices for learning: SMS updates from Google Calendar and Twitter, for instance, taking digital pictures instead of writing down homework, or podcasts and revision videos on their MP3/MP4 players.

Such discrepancies are dangerous. It means that the teacher is not protected if anything goes wrong. That’s fine for me, with my gung-ho attitude towards authority and copyright legislation, but less so for the ‘average’ teacher who is already cautious about the benefits of using educational technology. We need to say what is acceptable and what is not in this Web 2.0, digitally-connected world. Students, as teenagers, don’t live in what most adults would call the ‘real world’ anymore; it’s a blended digital/physical world with no hard-and-fast distinctions. Heck, even I don’t live in the ‘real world’. Reality is socially constructed.

It may not be possible to actually keep an AUP up-to-date about specific policies. Realistically, these things are only revisited once or twice a year at an absolute maximum. I know of some schools who have the same AUP from about 1994…

So, instead of a set of hard-and-fast rules, we need guidelines. I really liked the idea Pamela Livingston shared in the comments section here of a post on Classroom 2.0. She reports that her school came up with the acronym ‘LARK’:

Legal
Appropriate
Responsible
Kind

I think that’s a fantastic starting point, and a base from which few AUP’s could really go wrong. It reminds me of Sunday School, about putting what you’re going to say through the various seives of being loving, kind… anyway - I digress!

Earlier I mentioned that some schools haven’t updated their AUP’s since the early 90’s. That’s not to say that what they came up with then is completely irrelevant; it just needs updating and tweaking to reflect 2008 and beyond. Take, for instance, Dave Kinnaman’s 1995 essay (with lots of links!) entitled Critiquing Acceptable Use Policies. Kinnaman has updated this over the years to reflect the changing nature of schools and the digital world. He starts it off with a great quotation from Howard Rheingold:

This technological shock to our moral codes means that in the future, we are going to have to teach our children well.

Which is exactly how it should be: any AUP worth it’s salt should begin with what the educational instution is doing to educate the youngsters in it’s charge about such matters.

Dave Warlick’s wiki is probably the best place these days to go to look for sample AUP’s, as it pulls in tagged links from del.icio.us, diigo, etc. You could also try here. Every AUP must appropriately balance those things common to all Internet and educational technology users, and those things that are specific to the context of that particular educational institution and it’s members. I don’t think it’s ever acceptable to grab something that works for one school, college or university and expect it to just ‘work’ with yours; the AUP must be tailored to your specific situation.

At the end of the day, AUP 2.0 must be more a manifesto of what we want to achieve with educational technology than be about what we want to restrict and block. There are obviously websites, services and practices we want to ban outright - pornographic, violent and racist sites, for instance. Children cannot cope with the same things adults can. But it should still be the guiding principle of an AUP to allow as much as possible, used in an acceptable way as possible. Blocking things because of their ‘potential’ to be used inappropriately (Twitter? Bebo? YouTube?) is to avoid the issue and to abdicate our responsibility as educators in institutions that are supposedly about learning.

The AUP 2.0 for my school will hopefully follow in the near future. I need to persuade the Senior Management, governors and, indeed, staff that it needs to be revisited first!

Further reading:

Dave Warlick in 2006 on AUP 2.0
EDTECH magazine - AUPs in a Web 2.0 World
Langwitches - Acceptable Use Policy (great example of how to go about creating a collaborative AUP)
Generation YES blog - What message does your AUP send home?
Joseph Bires - Acceptable Use and Web 2.0 (part of the K12 Online Conference 2007 - also see this response)
An AUP for Web 2.0 (from a 1:1 laptop school)
techsavvygirl’s del.icio.us links on Acceptable Use Policies in School 2.0 Culture
Infinite Thinking Machine - How do we teach kids to cross a busy street? (compares AUPs with road safety education)
Wikipedia - Acceptable Use Policy

Image credit: Don’t Stop Questioning by contrapositively, Traffic Light Tree by Squirmelia & T-092-0197 by yanyanyanyanyan - all @ Flickr

Enough is enough. I think it was Clay Burrell who (via Twitter) initially pointed me towards this quotation by Gandhi: “Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.” Unhappily, teachers in many UK schools (and further afield) are forced into a kind of cognitive dissonance as a result of official mobile phone bans being flouted by almost every student in the school. In fact, it’s more than that. Teachers are made to feel guilty when they encourage students to use the technology they have for learning.

Andrew Field and I had a brief Twitter conversation about this situation recently. As a result, Andrew started a thread on the EffectiveICT.co.uk Forum to discuss the issue. I’d like to bring more people (i.e. YOU) into the discussion, especially if you’ve got any links to good and forward-thinking Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs)!

A brief search for AUPs relating to mobile devices brings up the following problematical example:

Mobile phones must not be used during the college day, including break and lunchtimes. Phones must be switched off during the day. If any student is found using a mobile phone at any time during the college day it will be confiscated until the end of the day

Of course, one can see why this particular college, like many educational institutions, has gone down this road. They’re protecting their own back; it’s the reason why networks often blacklist sites that teachers want to use for perfectly sound pedagogical reasons.

But then, there’s the rub. As Andrew Field pointed out, if the Internet connection’s already filtered, why lock pupils out of wireless networks and the like when they’re using their own devices? He cites using an iPod touch for accessing online content through the wi-fi connection in his department. There’s no reason why I couldn’t do the same - give out the password to students.

A big stumbling block is insurance, I suppose. But then, I’m only supposing. What exactly is the legal situation? Surely if a student damages their mobile phone/MP3 player in school it’s covered by their parents’ home insurance in the same way it would be on their way to and from school? Andrew quotes the following from Halifax insurance:

Personal Belongings
For those items that are normally worn or carried in everyday day life Halifax Home Insurance offer Personal Belongings cover away from the home both in the UK and abroad. This cover complements their unlimited sum insured contents insurance* and provides cover for items such as jewellery, money, credit cards and mobile phones.**

* Inner limits apply to certain areas of contents cover, including; money restrictions, single article & high risk item limits and contents left in the open. High risk items are subject to a £2000 limit per item. Details are available within the policy and schedule.
** Aggregate limits of between £2,500 and £10,000 apply. Individual limits apply to mobile phones, money, credit cards and pedal cycles.

I wonder if there’s anyone reading this who has links with those in the industry who could give a definitive answer?

Becta provide some reasonably helpful (general) advice on the subject, stating that an AUP should not stand alone, but instead be part of a ’safe ICT learning environment’, including:

an infrastructure of whole-school awareness, designated responsibilities, policies and procedures
an effective range of technological tools
a comprehensive internet safety education programme for the whole school community.

I agree. Unhelpfully, they state that there “are many sample acceptable use policies available, both online and via local authorities, which schools can use as a basis for their own policies” - but then fail to link to any.

To their credit, however, they have a PDF document from 2006 on E-safety which could provide an excellent platform to spark a discussion within your school. It covers everything from the potential dangers of online access, to the responsibilities for those with various (already extant) roles within the organization. It’s focus, nevertheless, is on prevention of abuse rather than enabling and opening-up as much as possible!

Diagrams are powerful tools when trying to effect change. This one, from the PDF mentioned above, demonstrates a sound (if slightly conservative) process. As technologies change, so must AUPs and, most importantly, the whole organization’s response. ICT lessons, as many teachers of the subject have realised, cannot simply be focused on learning how to use Microsoft Office and the like. They need to prepare students for the 21st century online world.

We need to create responsible users of the Internet and mobile devices. Yes, there are risks. Yes, there might be financial and other costs to the school. But isn’t it worth it in the long run?