Is Blogging Dangerous?

I've always found this interesting: we in the West who are teachers often have great difficulty getting anyone to listen to us, but yet in many societies, people find knowledge dangerous. It seems everywhere where revolution looms its head, teachers and academics are among the first to disappear.

I'm disturbed by a trend that has developed over the past year of blogs disappearing and teachers having career problems because they chose to write and work online with their students. We saw one teacher in the U.S. last year have a blogging project shut down when a parent objected (sorry, I've lost the reference, but would be interested in it if anyone has it). This year we've seen Paul Allison face troubles in NYC, we've also recently had Al Upton and the Minilegends be shut down, and now, most recently, and most disturbingly, Jabiz Raisdana in Qatar has lost his job because a parent objected to a link he had posted to his personal blog and artwork.

Several different nations, grade levels, situations, and troubles, but all with the common theme of people who were working online with their students both accessing and creating information, taking part in the read write web.

This sends a chill through me. Has blogging in the classroom become a political act? It is possible.

Blogging is subversive. It allows both students and teachers access to information and voices from around the world. It allows us circumvent department of education approved texts and videos. It allows us to consider our options, become literate informed sources and voices. In many ways, it allows us to be human, connected with each other and honest about our difficulties and failings.

Is this too much for conservative Western education systems?

As I think about my own classroom where we have ten laptops that kids are free to use throughout the day, where we have wireless iPods, personal laptops from home and hundreds of novels and magazines, I wonder honestly about the dangers I place myself in. What happens if parents complain about something I am doing or something kids have accessed while in my care? Is it my responsibility? Certainly it is. But it is also my responsibility to open kids up to new ideas, to safely expand and administer their learning networks. I have to expose them to new ideas, to change, to innovation, and to the world with all that might mean. As an educator, I cannot close kids off from the world and from new and challenging ideas and opinions.

People need to enter the blogosphere and these debates fully informed. There may be consequences for working online with your students. Personally I believe that the actions that were taken against these teachers and their students were heavy handed, possibly ill - informed and were inappropriate, possibly having global consequences. I have seen no dangers posed by these professionals working in globally connected spaces. But the fact is that we may be entering a new stage in the debates of using read/write technologies in classrooms, one where we need to work much harder to prove the worth of what we are doing.

Photo Credit: http://static.flickr.com/23/88570526_ff6fa8b1f0_o.jpg

Tags: PaulAllison, Jabiz Raisdana, Al Upton, blogging, politics, learning, classroom

Comments

[Gary Ball]

Our Department of Education and adminstrators are always pushing for Resource Based Learning. Blogs are just another resource. If they want us to pull from many different sources then the powers that be need to trust us to choose those resources. We can't just hold students back behind the safety net of a textbook. Let them be each other's resources.

Most of this just sounds like fear of the unknown. Your post also touches on the need to separate personal and professional life - something that teachers in small towns have always struggled with. And the internet just made our world smaller.

I wonder if there was the same reaction when the ballpoint pen was brought into the classroom?

[a. woody delauder]

I think that many bloggers feel like they can't be touched. They are writing words, publishing them on the internet, and a lot of times, never have to answer to others. They have this right. The problem is that everything can be accessed. I spend much of my time blurring out student faces to post pictures on my blog. I am real careful never to mention names of co-workers or the school in which I am employed.

Blogging can be dangerous, but should it be? People are losing jobs, not being considered for jobs, and being scorned, all for the content they choose to publish on the internet. What happened to freedom of speech? It has gone out of the window. The right should now say... "Freedom of Speech, as long as it doesn't offend anyone".

Good post. I look forward to reading more in the future :)

[mrsdurff]

A wise man once said, "If you're not willing to lose your job, you're not going to be able to do your job."
I live, blog, and participate online by that credo. Jabiz Raisdana, to his credit, has not been cowed by the experience. I would call for all to react in this way.
My job is to educate learners, not worry about silly admins or parents.

[Pat]

Blogging is way to exchange ideas and no one can control someone else's ideas. I think this is the problem with school systems and parents because it is scary for them when they longer feel they can control everything. When you take this risk, there is an element of trust that has to work both ways and some may be at this point when others aren't. That is where there is the problem. I'm not sure that there is a solution to this other than time. Just like everything new that comes about, sometimes it takes the test of time to show some people that the risk is worth it. I'm sure when the first automobile came out, there were many people against this too but now I can't imagine living without a car.

[Wm Chamberlain]

We can't let fear rule our lives. We will make mistakes. I have decided that my mistakes will come from pushing for my students best interests. I spent too many years making mistakes in my classroom. I really regret teaching my students the way I had been taught and I choose not to make that mistake again.

[Clarence Fisher]

Interesting how many of these comments rotate around fear. Fear of the unknown among parents and teachers. Fear of potential problems by department's of education. Fear growing among teachers of the consequences of working in these ways. It's also interesting that the people who are the least fearful seem to be the kids we work with in our classrooms.... I'm not sure what this says.

[Nabila]

Nice post =D. It was interesting and made me want to read more and more of it. Mr. Raisdana was my teacher for seventh grade Humanities. We were just on the comfortable scale of the whole blogging experience. He was so close to get through the most exciting and wonderful events that could ever happen to a teacher like him. Then one day...it all went blank. I was completely torn apart by the news. He had to sacrifice so much. I miss him...

[Doug Johnson]

Hi Clarence,

Good post and good reminder. This is the topic I addressed in my contribution to the Bloggers Cafe in Leading & Learning coming out in June.

Being subversive, but keeping one's job - based on this blog entry: http://doug-johnson.squarespace.com/blue-skunk-blog/2007/1/26/blogging-and-a-little-common-sense.html

We need subversives in the field but people need to be smart about it as well.

All the best,

Doug

[Sarah Kaminski]

I really enjoyed this post. I hadn’t thought about people getting in trouble for blogging, or having their students’ blog. In a way it seems silly, if all necessary precautions are taken to conceal identity and not breach protocol, then why shouldn’t they be allowed to blog? It very true that information on anything is at the fingertips of both educators, students and regular people, but to me it would seem more of a good thing than a bad. Maybe all the fuss over blogging is because it’s not teaching in the way that the people in charge have been taught, or maybe it is that the people in charge don’t want students to have access to all that information. I would understand if personal information was freely given, but it seems as though it wasn’t. I believe that blogging should continue, even if it means risking everything, what your students could learn from the experience is priceless.

[Ken]

Blogging is the exchanging of
ideas. It's communication...I
don't quite get where there is any danger in that. Books have been burned before because they
were considered dangerous. We
all own our own space and ability to think. No one can control that.