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Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune – Teacher e-mails made public Annotated

tags: management, policy, privacy, teaching

Teacher emails released to “make sure they’re doing their jobs.”

“Based on our interpretation of the current state law, the public interest demands those e-mails be released.”

Bubolz said in July he made the request to see if the teachers were doing their job “… the way it’s supposed to be done.”

“People will know this decision is out there,” Jonen said. “The effect will be any public employee that does a personal e-mail at work is subject to having that released.”

“There’s no misconduct at all; they don’t want the public to feel they were misusing resources,” she said. “These are e-mails they wrote to their friends, spouse or kids. It’s a little unsettling they will be for public view.”

Couple of key points to this in my mind.

1. If they were sending personal email against district policy they really don’t have any recourse.
2. If they didn’t do anything wrong (something the article fails to clarify) then their personal correspondence should not be publicly available (see item 1 for the counterpoint however).
3. If this is the case and a member of the public can request the emails of a public servant (which is a bit of a stretch to define a teacher as) be made public then why can I say with great confidence that this is far less likely to happen to the school administration?

Open Thinking & Digital Pedagogy » Freedom Sticks For The Classroom

Alec has posted an interesting article about his efforts to get around overly restrictive filtering and access controls.  In our back and forth comments a thought occured to me.  What if we were to use USB drives as “keys” to the internet.  Here’s the idea:

1. The teacher is given a USB key that includes a file with an encrypted sequence of characters that acts as their “authorization code”.
2. When they log into the network,  the login script looks for the key file and verifies the authorization code on the USB drive is the same as the one associated with the teacher’s account.
3. If they match, the teacher is granted full access.

What if scenarios:

1. Teacher logs in without the USB key – teacher is given standard network access (student level)
2. Student logs in with teacher’s USB key on student account – no special permissions are granted and a notification is sent to IT
3. One teacher logs in with another teacher’s USB key – only student level access is granted.
4. USB key is lost – the authorization code for that teacher is changed on the server, immediately making the old code invalid

I’m sure there are dozens of other situations we would need to take into account (and that it’s similar to VPN connections but not quite), but I’m curious what the IT people and teachers out there would think of this?

Techdirt: Is An Online Study Group Cheating?

Vincent Clement writes in to let us know that that a student at Ryerson University in Toronto is facing expulsion for setting up an online study group for his chemistry class using Facebook. The school is saying it wasn’t so much a study group as it was a place for 146 students to cheat and share answers (though, it’s only blaming the student who ran the group). Students at the university are reasonably up in arms over the matter, as they don’t see how it’s any different than a traditional study group. Of course, the whole thing seems a little bit silly. As we discussed almost exactly a year ago, people working together to collaborate is an important skill in the real world, and what some people consider “cheating” these days seems a lot like the type of collaboration that kids are quite used to doing online, and which should serve them well later in life.

We can view this quite easily.  The school doesn’t have a clue.  I look for this action to be retracted rather quickly.  If not, then anyone who knows chemistry should join his study group and give these guys a hand.

There’s a growing discussion surrounding the concept of tiered content filtering in schools.  The idea that staff and teachers should have access to a broader selection of content and materials from the internet than students is not new but is gaining traction.  Personally I like the idea of having the controls in place to allow teachers who have demonstrated the ability to manage and manipulate the internet effectively to have greater access to content.

Notice I did not say all teachers.  For staff members to receive enhanced access, and thereby accept a greater level of risk and responsibility, they should be required to complete additional staff development on internet safety and behavior.  This not only protects the staff member but also the students.  The paper trail on the training mitigates some of the risk for the school making the policy more palatable.

Technically, this type of tiered filtering can be managed at a network and account level.  This is not the challenging part.  The challenge comes from structuring the policy in such a way that access is greater without the sacrifice of safeguards for the students, staff, and the school.

Issues with tiered content filtering » Moving at the Speed of Creativity