A Fight for Control
This post is part of an ongoing series of chapters from the book CHOICE. Please view this post for an introduction and table of contents. To keep up with each new chapter published, please subscribe.
The more you control what happens on a district issued device the more disastrous the 1-1 program will be.
Your focus need to be educating staff and students on how to use the devices. Focus on what is possible with the technology and not what you're not allowed to do.
Don't try to lock down everything (it's a fools errands). Allow what you can. Mistakes can and will happen. Let mistakes be teaching moments. Mistakes done in school are controlled and corrected. Far better than happening outside the classroom.
Teach ethics and responsibility with the technology. Do not lock down everything so permission constantly is needed. Users will be afraid to explore the technology. The devices should be personal to the users, not have the feeling of a surveillance tool. Learning happens during exploration and experimentation. Technology follows the same rules. The goal is safety, not control.
The security practice of the district should be one of trust, but verify. The district should still keep track of what is done on the devices. Some of this is for legal requirements, but you’ll also need to refer back to logs when things really do go bad. These devices are still living in the technology sandbox of the school system.
Users need to be given more control. Letting them install apps and push the limits of the technology, but in the safe environment of the school system.
Author Comments
Trying something new by providing a peak into the writing process when possible or interesting.
This was a more difficult chapter to write up to this point. I constantly re-wrote and rearranged the content in this chapter. Removing entire paragraphs and sections. I knew in my head what I wanted to convey, but really struggled with the words for the concepts.
One particular example;
I went back and forth with this sentence “The goal is safety, not control.” The original line was, “the goal is security, not control.” Those two words, safety and security, hold similar but very different meanings.
It is about creating a comforting, growing, and nurturing environment. Safety is that in my head. Security is authoritarian. You are safe, but not sound. There is an ambiguity to security in my head.
If this rambling didn’t make sense to you, it provided a good explanation of what I went through writing this chapter.
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