As more and more teachers start integrating technology into their lessons we are going to see more and more power struggles happening between teachers and techs. It seems like the struggle between teachers and techs is happening all over the world. Why is this?

In the United States it is my understanding that federal law (CIPA) requires filtering of pornography and pornography ONLY! I read with much interest a post written by Wesley Fryer about two weeks ago where he wrote about what schools were required to block. Here is the quote from that post that caught my attention:

“Just as educator misconceptions have led to widespread, overly conservative interpretations of fair use provisions of U.S. intellectual property law (a situation being addressed by a forthcoming report due on November 11, 2008 from the Media Education Lab at Temple University under the leadership of Dr. Renee Hobbs) I think we have some cases of conservative misinterpretations of the FRCP by school district administrators and IT staff members when it comes to web 2.0 sites and technologies.”

How many teachers have found themselves in a struggle with district IT’s because they want a site unblocked? I would guess that most teachers have good reasons for requesting that specific sites be unblocked.  All teachers want it to be able to teach what they are asked to teach using resources of their choice. When techs decide not to unblock a site they are, in essence, directing the curriculum.

I just want an expert in school law to answer some very basic questions for me:

1. It is a violation of CIPA for students to use web based mail (Yahoo, Gmail, etc) at school?
2. Do schools who use Fire Fox risk losing eRate funding?
3. Why are high school students restricted from searching for “images” if there is a legitimate educational purpose for the search?

I am in a district where the word “conservative” does not even begin to describe the philosophy of the IT department. The situation is improving, but we still have a very long way to go. I am schedule to present about Twitter and Nings this Friday. Twitter and the Ning I created are still blocked at the main building.

Who should decide what gets unblocked? In my opinion it needs to be a shared decision between the tech, teacher, and administrator. However, an administrator should have the final word in the matter.

Thoughts?????