Schools, blogs, Xanga, MySpace...What's it all about, Alfie? Part II

In March 2005, the principal of a small 6-12 school near Rutland, Vermont blocked access to MySpace from the school's computers.  The prinicpal, Chris Souza, said his primary reason was "because blogging is not an educational use of school computers."  But he also put up the "internet predator" worry:  "As soon as someone has a name and a general geographic location, it can take an Internet predator 20 minutes to find their address and directions to their house," he said. "Any time a teen puts their own photo or biographical information on a Web site, it's something that parents at least need to know about."

This action set off a lot of reaction in the blogosphere:

Librarian.net said,

....the banned site is more of a social software network than a blogging site. The principal also has one good point — that kids should be cautious about how much personal information they put on web sites, as should we all — but both his strong and misapplied reaction and the slanted news article turn “blogging” into an oogyboogy man when this same issue could be seen as an opportunity to do some good education about the Internet generally and blogs and social software in specific. From my public librarian perspective I’m just happy people know how to use the tools. Blocking one site does absolutely nothing to solve any real or perceived dangers of sharing information on the Internet, period.

teach43.com said

I agree, it’s no place for middle school students. There are no structures in place to keep students away from lewd or sexual photos or profiles. There are groups there specifically for adults to discuss adult behavior (you can use your imagination) and no way to keep students out of them. In my opinion, it is definitely not appropriate for children. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of banning any site outright. I believe in teaching our students to surf intelligently and to use their best judgment regarding which sites to frequent. However, I completely understand why a school would ban this site and respect their right to do so. Odds are, I would probably react in exactly the same way if I were principal.

this commentator said,

Schools and the Internet are a volatile mix. School administrators and teachers are expected to do a lot. One of the things they try to do is watch out for what kids are doing. The standards they use are not and can not be the same as the most lenient parent in the school.....

shareski said,

Once again, paranoia reigns. As I think about school's efforts to "protect" students, I am puzzled by how many choose to simply ban or restrict rather than educate on appropriate use. My litmus test continues to be, does the value outweigh the negative? For me, blogging has such powerful potential that it requires teachers to teach ethics and protocol. If we don't do this, they'll still blog only they'll do it at home with little or no supervision or training in handling the technology.

Charlie O'Donnell  made what I think is the important point:

the site's heavy use underscores the need for proactive education on responsible maintainence of a public online identity.

Other schools have banned school-based access to other sites.  Evidently the Ann Arbor Public School District blocked access to Xanga (online links unavailable, as the Ann Arbor news only archives the last 14 days.)  I couldn't find an announcment, but the computer use agreement (link takes you to page to download PDF) makes it clear that students may not use the school's computers to:

A. Appropriate Use of the Internet
1. Do not receive or send communications which are disruptive, obscene,  pornographic, profane, vulgar, threatening or otherwise prohibited by law.
2. Do not receive or send a computer file or computer program that may harm  the Computing Environment or its resources.  (For example, a program  containing a virus that could damage software on network computers.)
3. (Students) Do not provide your name, address or picture to people or  companies on the Internet and Web without permission of your parent(s)  and a teacher.
4. (Students) Do not join or participate in a “chat” or other electronic  communication on the Internet without permission of your parent(s) and a  teacher.
B. The district pays a fee to access the Internet and Web.  It pays additional fees to  bring this service to each building.  At present, availability of Internet resources is  experimental.  Access in general, and the speed of access in particular, is not  guaranteed.

Schools in Cedar Rapids have blocked Xanga and other sites, not so much for predators, but for the things students were saying about each other and about faculty:

School technology facilitator Janet Erbe knows a lot about computers. So do more than 1800 students at Kennedy High School in Cedar Rapids. They also know one certain computer blog site is off limits. Erbe says, "it's frightening. It's frightening. That's why it is filtered here at school."

Erbe is talking about Xanga.com. An online diary blog site popular amongst Eastern Iowa teens. Erbe says, "kids use it to vent. And sometimes they say good things, sometimes they say inappropriate things." It's the inappropriate things that caused many schools in the Cedar Rapids district to block the site. Associate Principal Shannon Bucknell says the school had to discipline some students who were using the site. Bucknell says, "they were making harassing statements towards other students, towards staff members."

In April, The Kansas City Star ran a long article by Laura Bauer and Melodee Hall Blobaum (reprinted in full on Danah Boyd's blog, zephoria:

But while many agree that blogging can be good and that teens need an outlet to be creative and express their happiness or angst, these same people worry that parents often aren't aware of what their children post.

Law enforcement officials insist that most teens share too much information over the Internet and that this could make them bait for predators.

Then there are school officials. Their concerns include inappropriate content on blogs such as bullying and threats. They want students to focus on learning rather than blogging during school hours....

A high school teacher in California wrote in June 2005:

When I came back this year, I found that MySpace has absolutely exploded onto the Junior High and High School scene. Over 80% of the Seniors in my class had a MySpace site by the end of the this year, and it is growing! Students would sit next to each other in the computer lab, messaging each other on MySpace! People are MySpacing like crazy, sending pictures, e-mails, cell phone numbers...........wait a minute...........cell phone numbers?

Ahhh, now we come to the problem. Students are posting things that could get them in big trouble on the Internet and don't realize that MySpace is very public. It is no wonder that schools are clamping down on the website. I don't think that the fact that students are using it so much is the problem, as much as what is posted on them.

It turns out that the MySpace blockage in Vermont, in March 2005, wasn't the first, it was just the first to hit the news.   It's been blocked in some California schools for over a year (:Download ParentAdvisory_myspacecom.pdf))

Since October of 2004 Murrieta Valley Unified  School District has blocked access to [MySpace]  from any school computer in our district due to the  inappropriate content of some of the personal web sites.   

"Inappropriate content" means images of underage students drinking and using drugs, and possibly some rather racy pictures posted by ill-advised teen girls.  It may also mean harsh criticism of school officials and teachers.

In October 2005,  Rev. Kieran McHugh took it a step further.  Students at Pope John XXIII Regional High School may not have any online presence, or face suspension.  This edict included profiles at MySpace, and blogs.

"I don't see this as censorship," McHugh said this week. "I believe we are teaching common civility, courtesy and respect."

The primary impetus behind the ban is to protect students, McHugh said. The Web sites, popular forums for students to blog about their lives and feelings about their teachers and schools, are fertile ground for sexual predators to gather information about children, he said. They also are venues for cyber-bullying and harassment....

"If this protects one child from being near-abducted or harassed or preyed upon, I make no apologies for this stance,"McHugh said.

It was a change from previous policy: "While Pope John's school handbook does not specifically forbid students from creating personal profiles on Web sites, it does prohibit students from posting anything on the Internet pertaining to the school, without the school's permission."

I do not know how many schools have such a policy.  It's a good field for investigation.

Update: According to the Wall Street Journal, 

the Roman Catholic Diocese of Paterson, N.J., banned the students at its 58 elementary schools and five high schools from maintaining personal Web pages on sites like MySpace and Xanga, a blogging service. Marianna Thompson, director of communications for the diocese, said the goal of the ban is to protect students from online predators, as well as to prevent students from harassing or bullying each other. "An unsupervised blog is an inappropriate use of their time," she said.

I was unable to verify the ban.

Kevin Bankston, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said of the previous action by Fr. McHugh at Pope John XXIII High School:

"It's an incredible overreaction based on an unproven problem," Bankston said. "If they're concerned about safety, they could train students in what they should or shouldn't put online. Kids shouldn't be robbed of the primary communication tool of their generation."

Acknowledging that teenagers can be poor decision-makers, at times, Bankston said the school is doing them a disservice by not showing them how to use these sites in a responsible way.  "Kids can get approached by bad people on the street, but schools traditionally don't tell them not to go out without a chaperone," Bankston said. "They teach them not to talk to strangers."

Bankston said he believes the real motivation for school officials was to suppress negative comments about the school posted by students.

As with the previous story, the ban sparked a huge internet debate.  The Electronic Freedom Foundation has a FAQ page for student bloggers   The Committee to Protect Bloggers has several guides to anonymous blogging (see right-hand sidebar).

Clarifying the Issues
As I wrote this article, it became clear to me that the issue of students' presence on the internet, and schools' response to student internet use, have a number of issues, not always clearly thought out by commenters.  Here are the discrete issues I see:

• School-based computing: inappropriate use of scarce resources (the primary reason many of the districts gave for blocking school-based access to Xanga, LiveJournal, and MySpace)
• Students' on-line safety--the "Internet Predator/Stranger Danger" fear, that a bad person could find and harm the student from content the student posted to sites such as Xanga, LiveJournal, and MySpace.
• Students' on-line safety-- students' being exposed to pornography and other inappropriate  content.
• The content of students' blogs (Xanga, LiveJournal)  and social networking accounts (MySpace): using such spaces to voice harsh, even foul-mouthed   criticisms of school administration
• The content of students' blogs (Xanga, LiveJournal)  and social networking accounts (MySpace):  Students' inapppropriate interactions online with fellow students (the cyberbullying fear, or actual instances of students abusing or harrassing each each other).
• Repercussions to students from on-line content they have posted: School administration finding out that students have engaged in illegal or banned activites (drinking, cheating, harassment) and using that content to discipline students
• Repercussions to students from on-line content they have posted:  What's posted on the internet may live forever, coming back to injure a person in the future (Example: one's teen excesses showing up when a future employer undertakes a web search on a prospective employee).

As I continue on with this story, I hope to tease out the connections between the issues, and what parents, students, and schools can do to make blogging and social networking software good for all students to use.

But, should schools (public and private) have the right to block access to given sites?  I think absolutely they do, if only on resource allocation grounds.  The schools (whether public or private) only have so much bandwith, and more importantly, only so many keyboard hours, so to speak.  If a child is using up school computer time to update her MySpace profile, or  post messages to  friends,  it's computer time that is not being put to more directly educational uses, such as researching an assignment or composing an essay.

Do public schools have the right to tell students how to conduct their off-campus lives?   In other words, do public schools have the right to tell students the consequence of merely having a MySpace account (for example)  is suspension or expulsion?  I am not a lawyer, but I believe that is a stickier question. 

How about the private schools, like Pope John XXIII?  Do they have a right to declare that students may not have blogs or MySpace accounts, or face expulsion?  Clearly private schools can limit student behavior in ways that public schools cannot, including declaring an on-line presence a expulsion offence. 

But is that the best way to teach students how to conduct themselves online?  I don't think so.  I'll talk about that in Part VI.   

Part I--Blogging, social networking sites, schools, and risk for teen users
Part II -- Schools Banning Access and Banning Students' Online Presence
Part III--An Overblown Fear: The Internet Predator
Part IV--The Real Risk: Other Students' Cruel, Rude, or Illegal Behavior (or the Poster's Own Cruel, Rude, or Illegal Behavior)
Part V--The Benefits of Blogging, Personal and Educational
Part VI--What Should Parents and Schools Do?

 

Technorati: myspace

Comments

[Lisa]

Kids don't need webspace to harass, humiliate and threaten one another over the internet. In cases I've heard about, email and instant messages have been the culprits, not blogs.

[Liz]

Lisa is absolutely correct....in fact, I was part of what I'd call a harassment storm for about 6 weeks in 1961, without phones or blogs or IM. It was known as the "slam book" back then in the neolithic. Each girl in the class had a page (or two or three) in this notebook that circulated, secretly, among the girls. It would just appear in your desk (you remember those desks, the lid would raise)...opened to your page.

Well, today it would be a cause celebre among the parents, I am sure. Back then it just made me miserable on three counts: what was said about me, what I wrote about others, and how I colluded in the passing-on.

Boys do that kind of collective shunning and shaming, I am sure, only I think it happens a couple of years later for them.

In other words, I'm not writing this series for any other reason than to say, don't demonize this new service or medium.

[Renee]

I think blaming a website(liek myspace and xanga) for irresponsible online acticity is the worst thing anyone has ever come up with. Have you ever thought to blame the parents? For not teaching their child proper online etiquette? If the parents took more responsiblity into teaching their child the correct morals, we would not be sitting here saying that websites are the problem of america.

for you, you do not have to fill out your profile on either myspace or xanga, you can leave it blank or even hide it.

and not all kids on myspace talk about drugs and sex, some even have religiouse sites on myspace? are you banning htem from spreading the word of our Lord, because some kids do not know how to act online?

And is it fair to punish all kids for the sins of few?

And saying they cant "blog" is like saying they cant keep a diary? If someone got a hold of that it would be just as potent as a online website.

and God knows what we do anyway, so surely blogging it will not bring us down to hell.

and as for online predators, without names, adresses or phone numbers how are they going to find you?

Dont blame a website for lack of parental responsibilty, make the parents take back that responsibilty and instill it in the kids. The kids didnt grow up with a computer, they grew up with their parents.

[vyden]

hiii

[Brianna]

I agree with schools banning these websites and at the same time, parents should also monitor what their children are doing..
would any parent just let their kids go out for the evening with out knowing where they are going? I don't think so.
Also we always hear about students using these websites, what about the teachers and/or administrators who have used these sites to bad mouth others etc??
What is being done about them?
We have one in our district and no one can seem to get rid of that person? What kind of message does that send?

[shmekerosu@yahoo.com]

It can be easy accessed from school or work via web proxy server: www.surfinter.net They block the sites but kids can access anyway. Parents and teachers should watch for the kids.

[claus]

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