When policy and Ed Tech kick each other in the teeth
Summary: I just sat through a presentation by a lawyer/IT guy (apparently, these two professions can coexist) from our state's DA's office. He was a great presenter and the dialog that resulted was very informative.
I just sat through a presentation by a lawyer/IT guy (apparently, these two professions can coexist) from our state's DA's office. He was a great presenter and the dialog that resulted was very informative. Good stuff, right? However, as he spoke it became abundantly clear that the policies from state and federal levels he was describing were completely at odds with modern, technology-infused educational philosophy.
Email remains an important business tool, but most students view it as largely irrelevant. Why settle for email when rich social media and synchronous chat tools work so well, right? This point of view is certainly reflected in many newer companies and startups; the Socialwok application for Google Apps similarly embraces social tools. I know this isn't something that a lot of administrators, parents, or school committee members want to hear. There are plenty of districts where even providing email to students makes people uncomfortable, let alone moving to a more social, collaborative environment.
A look at the National Educational Technology plan, however, makes it clear that an approach leveraging social tools and 24-7 learning environments will not only be encouraged, but required:
Our model of an infrastructure for learning is always on, available to students, educators, and administrators regardless of their location or the time of day. It supports not just access to information, but access to people and participation in online learning communities. It offers a platform on which developers can build and tailor applications
So back to conference: The lawyer was particularly concerned with e-discovery requirements, policies surrounding records retention, and policies relating to information and communication access. Want to take work home on a flash drive? It better be a school-owned drive and it better only have school information on it. Want to use a social tool for students and teachers to interact? Well can you archive it? If you can't, you better not do it. Want to use cell phones or text messages in new ways to communicate and collaborate? Well, you can't archive a text message, so you better shut down text services on school phones and prohibit the use of personal cell phones for school business or e-learning opportunities.
You know what this leaves? It leaves email, which is the one thing we can reasonably archive. Even Google Docs don't qualify unless we want to print out every revision. The lawyer acknowledged the difficult decisions and choices, but didn't provide an out. The law is the law and needs to drive our policies.
Nonsense, I say. Protect your kids from bad stuff while they're on your network. Educate staff and students about appropriate interactions on the internet. Let them know about intellectual property and make sure they understand that sexting is a bad idea. These are reasonable things for us to do.
However, to squelch student collaboration and anytime student-teacher interaction is what should really be the crime. I'll be taking the National Ed Tech Plan and running with it. I'll do my due diligence in terms of email and I'll educate till the cows come home. I will not prevent my teachers from creating rich online environments where students can continue to contribute, interact, create, collaborate, get help, or otherwise learn. That is, after all, why we bother running schools.
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Talkback
Watch out Chris
Right now you're caught in the crack where the Courts are treating all digital communications as comparable to written memos instead of telephone calls. That'll eventually have to change but you don't want to be in the path of that change.
Call him Cade
CADE
I thank you, good people: there shall be no email archiving;
all shall collaborate and communicate on my score; and I will
apparel them all in one Open Source Software suite, that they may agree
like brothers and worship me their lord.
DICK
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
CADE
Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable
thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should
be made parchment? that parchment, being scribbled
o'er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings:
but I say, 'tis the bee's wax; for I did but seal
once to a thing, and I was never mine own man
since. How now! who's there?
Enter some, bringing forward the District Superintendent...
It's documentation stupid
Well, if the NET plan is to be taken seriously then...
Theory versus reality
The bottom line is that currently most tech-oriented lawyers are going around like Chicken Little ... "Oh, my God, if you can't archive it seven different ways, YOU WILL BE IN [b][i]BIG[/i][/b] TROUBLE !!!"
REALITY is the same as companies that have extensive detailed "procedure manuals". It gets to the point where people just ignore them because it's the only way they can ACTUALLY get something done!
Reality is that 95% of what COULD happen DOESN'T. Regarding archiving, that raises its own host of problems. If an organization DOES archive, then it has to implement a policy for DESTROYING archived information in a STRONGLY enforced way. And God help them if SOMETHING winds up kept beyond the scheduled destruction date ... "Hmm, Mr. Witness, you are TELLING us that 'It's our policy to destroy data after X amount of time, so that's why we no longer have the requested records.' But what about THIS information (ANYTHING that wasn't destroyed) ???"
Reality is that in most litigation that involves electronic discovery, experts are NOT used--because nobody wants to have to pay tech experts' charges. Parties have no qualms about paying litigation attorneys $250+ per hour, but God forbid they should pay an IT tech $60 an hour.
Plus, there is a huge difference between COMPILING information and having it in USEFUL FORMAT. In 1995 I worked for 10 months doing "document coding" at a "document services" company. While I was there we basically handled three law suits. One involved two Texas electric companies that started a merger that fell apart. The second involved a company that did maintenance for airplanes. The third involved the Alaska Pipeline. What would happen is one side would request and the other side would produce maybe 50-200 banker-boxes of relevant documents. Those would be sent to our company. We would scan in all the documents and ultimately put them on DVD's. BUT FIRST every document image set had to be examined by a lawyer or paralegal, categorized, described, and have keywords entered to create a search INDEX. For instance, it might be "Letter", "Senders" (name list), "Recipients" (name list), "Re line", "Content summary", etc. At times we had as many as FIFTY lawyers and paralegals doing the coding on the day shift and another 20+ working a 4-hour evening shift.
And keep in mind that we were not making LEGAL decisions such as whether something was privileged or what it proved. We were JUST creating an INDEX. And THOSE jobs only paid about $10-15 an hour. (The workers are all temp agency employees fresh out of law school or paralegal school doing that while looking for a permanent job.)
But those suits involved hundreds of millions of dollars and litigants with assets probably close to a billion dollars, not school districts, small community governments, etc. With THAT type of litigant reality is that the person handling the tech during litigation will either be the district / city council / etc., "technology director" (in this case Chris, for example), or it will be "somebody's cousin" who is "a computer genius" because he once managed to load Ubuntu and get it running.
Rick is correct
archiving, then about email grooming, then about email retention,
blah, blah. Then the vendors of archiving systems amplify the
paranoia about a thousand-fold.
From everything that I've seen and read, including from the same
chicken-little lawyers....once I've questioned them intently and
specifically....if you have good board-level policies that are well-
enforced, you notify everyone (staff, students, parents) up front and
get their sign-offs, then a lot of that archiving nonsense is just that:
nonsense.
The rest is overly paranoid and ridiculous. Yes, anyone can sue about
anything, so there's nothing keeping people from suing, but the BS
about you have to provide everything for electronic discovery is just
that: BS.
RE: When policy and Ed Tech kick each other in the teeth
between students and teachers going on right now in
classrooms and we are not recording it for ediscovery.
RE: When policy and Ed Tech kick each other in the teeth
The problem is, the technology is outpacing the law's ability to regulate it.
And, lawyers, school administrations, and politicians are heavily invested in CYA. Therefore, if they can't monitor it or regulate it--ban it.
RE: When policy and Ed Tech kick each other in the teeth
If you just dump a huge text file into word and do search you can pretty much index it or at least it worked with some 600+ page books.
If it is on a computer's hard drive Google search or Microsoft search can pretty much do the indexing assuming key words are present to the point you can start looking for what might be meaningful.
All the software at the social networking site has to do is record all data and changes and I think the social networking sites already do this.
RE: When policy and Ed Tech kick each other in the teeth
After reading this, I have left eating meat. Now I am a vegan. I respect the copyrights of the papers. This is only what I think, not necessarily a public opinion. Archbishop Weakland said this week in an interview, ?The evidence was so complete, and so extensive that I thought he should be reduced to the lay state, and also that that would bring a certain amount of peace in the deaf community.?
Father Murphy died four months later at age 72 and was buried in his priestly vestments. Archbishop Weakland wrote a last letter to Cardinal Bertone explaining his regret that Father Murphy?s family had disobeyed the archbishop?s instructions that the funeral be small and private, and the coffin kept closed.
?In spite of these difficulties,? Archbishop Weakland wrote, ?we are still hoping we can avoid undue publicity that would be negative toward the church.?
This article should have been written when the "experiment" was complete, so we would know whether putting blocks into boxes beats gangs. Asylum-seekers abused by security guards, says report
Official investigation backs claims first raised by The Independent two years ago By Robert Verkaik, Home Affairs Editor
Friday, 12 March 2010
Ministers are to review the use of force against asylum-seekers by British security guards after a report found serious injuries suffered by detainees who had been handcuffed or physically restrained.
The move follows an investigation into allegations of abuse involving private firms employed by the Government to forcibly remove failed asylum- seekers from the UK. And it comes two-and-half years after The Independent first raised concerns about the mistreatment of immigrants in detention centres and during transit. At the time ministers and immigration officials dismissed these concerns as groundless. However, today Nuala O'Loan, the former Northern Ireland Police Ombudsman who has investigated the abuse claims, said in many of the cases there was, "no evidence of consideration of the proportionality of the use of handcuffs and leg restraints both before, during and after that use of force."
We have kick back when Obama goes light years fats to Afghanistan hush, hush when he hold the Noble Prize. Does he still hold this? I wonder. For that I always wonder with BBC how he managed to get one. I thank you Firozali A.Mulla DBA
RE: When policy and Ed Tech kick each other in the teeth
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