Further reaction or is it fear?

Just read understanding Digital Citizenship which really got me thinking about what we are publishing here at Katikati. I guess I’ve always been pretty keen on open access and happily publish family photos and videos. Now that all of our students can have blogs however I’ve really had to re-evaluate how much we should publish.

Just recently I put a video of some students doing maths problems on Youtube, now after reading about star wars kid I kind of wonder what we should be doing in the way of publishing video and photos.

On November 4, 2002 the boy made a video of himself swinging a golf ball retriever around as a weapon, presumably imitating the Darth Maul character from Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace who wields a double-bladed lightsaber. The video was filmed at the studio of his high school, and the tape was left forgotten in a basement. The original owner of the videotape discovered his recorded acts and immediately shared it with some friends. Thinking that it would be a funny prank, they encoded it to a WMV file and shared it using the Kazaa peer-to-peer file sharing network.

It seems from reading The cool cat teacher and other US blogs that there is real paranoia in America and I guess with their legal system a law suit is around every corner for teachers but what are the implications for us in New Zealand?

I’m a firm believer in “why block websites”, parents don’t have proxies and the main reason we block access is to cover our own behind, especially with a media that would love a juicy story like those mentioned in the digital citizenship article. The real filtering needs to happen where students get unsupervised internet access and with the level of parents knowledge of this growing and an increased cybersafety message I feel we are on the right track.

So I guess this article will mean some more discussion on what we publish at our schools here and what is blocked but then It is a sad world we live in where we are scared of doing anything on the internet which being honest is what it feels like some days.

As an aside and rereading this post an hour later I find it Interesting that here I was worrying about this and it seems pcworld published almost all the videos as a greatest hits of viral video, so maybe the world doesn’t care about the feelings of its published victims.

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Tags: AlecCouros, digital literacy, citizenship, education, innovation, teaching, teacher, news,