I've had some contact with Benjamin Wilkoff. We've traded a few emails. From my experience he seems like a smart, dedicated teacher, who has a a great understanding of 2.0 tools and how they can be leveraged for the benefit of students.
This is part of the reason why I was tremendously disappointed to read today that his students have lost contact with a group of students across the country when a parent from the out of state class complained. As I said when I left a comment on Ben's blog, I was disappointed, but not totally surprised. I knew someone was going to get criticized for hooking their students up with others somewhere for some reason.
Ben is completely open in his post, telling us that he had a few pictures of students posted and that some kids used their real names (all of my kids do) in their work. He deserves great credit for his honesty and opening his classroom to us. I don't see a single thing wrong with what he did.
But I feel the chill from this event. The parent did not just complain, she went to the General Attorney to see if there have been any laws broken in this collaboration.
Isolationist views like this are dangerous in an interconnected world.
I know that I just e-mailed you, but I wanted to give you an update that I just received from the teacher in CT. The teacher started up a lesson plan blog on my suggestion (http://pbogush.edublogs.org/), and he just told me that it has died for this year (along with the wiki), but that he has every intention of bringing both of them back next year. In fact, he has just written a grant for our collaboration so that the school district will have more of an incentive to let him do it. I hadn't thought about going that route, but I think it definitely has promise. Do you have any other suggestions for him?
Posted by: Ben Wilkoff | Saturday, May 12, 2007 at 12:11 PM