Why We’re Told No.

From my experiences and what I’ve read and gained from talking with other educators, we are generally told we cannot use blogs in the classroom for various reasons.

1. Blogs violate student privacy laws created in FERPA (US only, but I think many countries have similar guidelines).
2. Blogs make students vulnerable to internet predators.
3. Blog posts are disruptive to a student’s education.
4. Students are unaware that what they post online is available to anybody surfing the web.
5. Blogging is not educational.

Now, in the world of academe and politics, the solution to these problems–beyond banning blogs–is to pass rules and legislation that prevents educators from using any form of new technology in the classroom. I think, at least in the realm of academe that these rules are too often passed by administrators who do not fully understand the full capacity of these new technologies. Administrators who blog, from my experiences and the experiences of those that I have spoken to, tend to support teachers in their decision to add this media to their pedagogical practices. This is not to say that all administrators who do not blog are not willing to see how this works, but I believe the majority are too hesitant for the rules listed above. So, I want to take a second and look at each of these objections from a educator’s standpoint.

Blogs violate student privacy laws created in FERPA

(US only, but I think many countries have similar guidelines).

This is a hard one for me to wrap my mind around right now. The reason for this is that I’ve read the FERPA policy many times and I understand that, at it’s core, I cannot give out their personal information. But, I don’t see how this is a violation of FERPA rights. So, I’m working on getting this question answered. This is the reason that I was not allowed to use blogs in my class this semester. It came from one of the deans who is also a former English Professor, so I’m going to see if I cannot have a sit down with her and find out what the scoop is on this one. I’ll post more after I have the chance to chat with her about the reasons behind this.

Blogs make students vulnerable to internet predators.

I can see the motivation behind this argument. When the news headlines are talking about a young girl committing suicide because of a MySpace hoax, I can see the administrators being gun-shy about allowing teachers to require blogs as a course component. However, I still think that this is the wrong way to approach the problem. In my classes, I talk a lot about safety on the Internet. When my students were using Wordpress blogs for their blogs (I’ve now switched to the blog provided through Blackboard due to the rule changes) we talked about the username they chose, the name of their blog and the address they gave to the blog. I made sure that my students were aware of the potential dangers to setting up a “Janedoe.wordpress.com” address. We talked about the information they should and should not put into their About Me pages. But then we took the discussion a step farther.I did not limit the discussion to the class blog. I spent a week’s worth of class talking to my students about the perils of using their real name and information on the Internet. We created a game to play in class focused around who’s MySpace page was the safest.

These are the kind of things that we need to do with our students. If we make them aware of these dangers in real time learning experiences, then we have a chance at teaching them to be careful of the Internet as a whole. Banning blogs from the classroom is not the answer. We have to remember (as former students) the allure to books, movies, and other things that have been banned. But I think that Wes Fryer says it best:

Generally adults help young people learn to drive safely before giving them car keys and turning them loose on the streets of the world. Young people also need guidance and adult assistance to learn how to safely navigate the virtual environments of the 21st Century. Schools must be proactive, rather than merely defensive, in helping students acquire the skills of digital citizenship needed today and in the future. Simply banning read/write web tools on school networks is an inadequate response: Educators must strive to learn alongside students and parents how these technologies can be safely and powerfully used to communicate and collaborate (SafeDSN)

Seriously, if we expect students to know how to be safe on the Internet, can we expect this knowledge to be ingrained in them before they enter our classrooms? I don’t assume that my students have ever been taught the rules of plagiarism–even if they say they have. So why would I assume that somebody else had told them about Internet safety? Okay, off the soap box and onto the next reason.

Blog are disruptive to a student’s education.

Blogs are not educational.

Alright, I can see these arguments too and I’m going to tackle them together. Blogs can be disruptive to education. If Jane is posting her latest love poem to a crush on their blog instead of working on their Calculus homework. I’m willing to bet, though, that if the blog is for a class, we won’t see the love poem on that blog. So, I contend that we have to look at the difference in personal and educational blogs. I teach in a classroom that doubles as a computer lab during the off-periods. Students can get on these computers during class and surf their MySpace and their Facebook page. They can tweet about how boring my class is that day. Each of these means of communication is disruptive to the student’s education during my class. So, if the concern around blogs is that the tool is disruptive, why do the schools not block these other sites too? These sites are, at least in my class, more disruptive than blogs that I ask students to maintain. Why? Because when students blog on a class related blog, they are not disrupting the educational process, but rather furthering it.

Students are unaware that what they post online is available to anybody surfing the web.

So, while I think Jane’s love poem can be disruptive to her education, I must first ask if the poem Jane is blogging is on a blog for her creative writing class. If so, then the disruption to Calculus is still in the realm of education. If we cannot allow students to further their education through a means that engages them, how can we be educators?

What We Can Do

We cannot combat the problem with all of these issues on our own. But there is one thing that can be done to further facilitate the comprehension of administrators when it comes to blogs and other new medias. We cannot expect administrators to make the right decision if they are not informed on the advantages of these technologies. You know the feeling you get when you realize that your student knows more about the topic you’re teaching than you do? Do you remember how you feel about not knowing the answer to the question? Do you think that administrators may feel the same, especially in a world that automatically assumes that the higher your position of authority, the more you know? We need to sit down and talk to these administrators so that we can ascertain if the problems we’re encountering come from their lack of knowledge with blogs or from their refusal move into the digital age. If the administrator’s problem is lack of knowledge, then we, as teachers, need to take the first step to talk to the administrators about the rewards of blogs (and other medias). If you’re faced with an administrator who refuses to move into the digital age, try talking. If it doesn’t work, be patient, you never know what might happen.

If you haven’t already posted to Al Upton’s blog to support his students, do so. Together, we might change the mind of one administrator. I’m sending an email to my dean. She’s always proven rational in the past.

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This article is also featured on TheApple; join the conversation on privacy and Internet safety with other teachers in TheApple’s article discussion

Chun’s introduction focuses on the ideas of control and power as they apply to the Internet. Examining Deleuze’s and Foucault’s ideas of control societies and the differences between control societies and disciplinary societies. Chun looks at the ways in which control and power, in the terms of the Internet, always relate to ideas of sexuality and how these relationships led to the early means in which censors sought to quash the Internet and how early examinations of MUDs and MOOs clenched Foucault’s argument on discursive sexuality. As she wraps up the examination of the friction that exists among forms of Internet control and power, Chun concludes that these two ideals are not opposites, but are, in fact opposite sides of the same coin.

Chapter One: Why Cyberspace

n “Why Cyberspace,” Chun explores the idea behind the term “cyberspace” as a term used in relation to the Internet. The term “cyberspace” first appeared in William Gibson’s _Neuromancer,_ but looked there nothing like our perception of cyberspace. Chun also discusses how the term “cyberspace” is misleading since the actual idea of cyberspace “erases all reference to content, apparatus, process or form, offering instead a metaphor and a mirage, for cyberspace is not spatial” (39). She look closely at how communications and Internet browsing do not actually take place in space, but term was found by judges to be more appropriate since it allowed legislation to look at the various “areas” of the Internet. Additionally, Chun compares the lack of space and place that occur when a person is online to the specific space and place of the television. She explains that with television a program comes on at a certain time (space) and on a certain channel (place) and no “back” button exists to return a viewer to a previous space and place. However, cyberspace functions as a form of “time travel” since viewers can be in multiple places at the same time and can skip back to a page they viewed in the literal past without disrupting time continuums. It is for this reason, asserts Chun, that Foucault’s idea of a heterotopia exists in cyberspace. Since viewers are neither in a specific place or time, they have the ability to be anywhere, public or private. Finally, Chun looks at the variations of people who can exist in cyberspace and, as with the name cyberspace, many of these people come from SciFi novels. For example, she discusses the era of the cyerpunk, Benjamin’s rubbernecker, and Baudeleire’s flaneur. Through these classifications, Chun looks carefully at the various types of users in cyberspace and how each one functions in the see and be seen relationship that pervades cyberspace.

Chapter Two: Screening Pornography

Asserting that cyberporn is another of Foucault’s technologies of the self and that it, therefore, requires the entire social body to place themselves under surveillance and pay close attention to the movements they make as individuals in the world of Internet and Internet pornography, Chun raises the question of for whom or to whom we are to place ourselves under surveillance. Then, with this question looming unanswered, Chun shifts into the history of cyberspace and pornography. She frames the chapter, largely, around early writings on Internet pornography by Elmer-Dewitt. Chun continues through the analysis of the works of these two cyberporn scholars and the impact this work had on bringing cyberporn into the eyes of the public, thus making it appear even worse than it truly was.

Additionally, Chun looks at the work of the CDA and COPA to eliminate access to porn by those 18 and under. The CDA passed an act that threatened up to $100,000 and two years in prison to anybody who, in any way, attempted to pass cyberporn along to a minor.

Two of the most interesting points that Chun makes in this point are in relation to the idea of “control” and the Internet. Chun points out, first, that many of the fears parents have about their children viewing pornography in cyberspace stems from their own feeling of powerlessness in relation to the use of the Internet. Chun asserts that since parents were unable to fully control the Internet and the sites that they were viewing (i.e. were not able to prevent pornography pop-ups or, for that matter, any form of pop-up), they transferred their fear from their own powerlessness to the powerlessness of their children since this allows them to ignore their own powerlessness. The other point that Chun makes is in relation to Foucault’s ideas of power and how this can be asserted by the viewer in cyberspace. Chun asserts that Internet users who interact with the amateur models on webcams are feeling that they actually control the moves of these models, thus allowing the voyeur the chance to feel they are in control and, therefore, assert the power over these women.

Chapter Three: Scenes of Empowerment

In this chapter, Chun discusses the ways that advertisers sought to change the face of the Internet. Advertisements by ISPs in the 1990s desperately sought to change the viewer and user’s concept of the Internet from one of uncontrollable pornography to one of a Utopian community blind to the constraints that separate us in reality.

Chun looks specifically at how MCI’s 1997 “Anthem” commercial sought to promote the Internet as a “medium of minds” (131) as opposed to a medium concerned with race, color, creed, gender, or disability. Chun discusses how the Internet provided users with the idea that they could sign in and become whoever they wanted to be without being questioned. She examines how the focus on the Internet in the MCI commercial was on masking your identity to obliterate standard classifications, and how MCI portrayed the Internet as a place that masks the user but never hints that as the user is lying to others about their own self, they too are being lied to about other users’ identities. In addition, Chun looks at the way that the Internet’s intention to obliterate race did not obliterate the idea of racism on the Internet. She reveals that the message of the Internet is not anti-discrimination based, but rather racism avoidance.

Through the chapter, Chun looks at several images in the commercial as presenting the Internet as user friendly for all users. She focuses on the image of the elderly man, the young girl, and the African-American businessman to demonstrate MCI’s goal to present the Internet as user-friendly, not race-specific. In addition, her look at the father and daughter using the Internet together examines how the Internet is family friendly, a far cry from the previous arguments on the pervasiveness of pornography that would pollute the minds of children.

Also, Chun looks at the attempts of sites like MongrelX to obliterate pornography on the Internet. Chun explains how the search engine MongrelX does not function as a typical search engine and simply send users to the pages they want to see, but how it links racist search terms and redirects the user to webpages devised to begin eliminating racism on the Internet. In this section, Chun looks at several of MongrelX’s web pages including hte Natural Selection page which demands readers question their racist beliefs. Another site that Chun looks at is the Venus Fly Killer site that appears when users type racist slang into the search engine. This site pulls up a page with multiple racist slang terms and forces the reader to continue to grapple with pop-up boxes that ask questions such as “Is this what you think of me?”

Overall, Chun is examining the way that ISPs touted the Internet as a place to overcome the racist and digital divide compared to how the Internet is actually working to overcome these divides. In all, a very interesting chapter that kept me reading throughout. I was, however, disappointed to find out that the Venus Fly Killer site is no longer linked to MongrelX and is, apparently, no longer on the Internet.

Chapter Four: Orienting the Future

In this chapter, Chun analyzes the text of William Gibson’s Neuromancer to seek an answer to the question: “To what extent is cyberpunk a symptom of or a diagnosis of our ‘present’ condition and to what extent is Neuromancer really postmodern?” (174). Chun asserts that cyberspace is not the origin of what we understand as cyberspace, but rather a conflation of what we understand cyberspace to be. Looking closely at the text and comparing it to Mamoru Oshii’s anime feature Ghost in the Shell, Chun examines the concept of high-tech Orientalism put forth in both works and ties this trend to the East-West rhetorical division that erases the majority of Asia and conflates the continent into thee bustling nation of Japan. By creating this Japanified future, Chun writes, “cyberspace appears to be a Western frontier in which U.S. ingenuity wins over Japanese corporate assimilation, for cyberspace allows for piracy and autonomy” (187). She relates the characters and settings in cyberpunk, specifically in Neuromancer, to the U.S frontier filled with cowboys attempting to tame and conquor the land. The difference between the cybercowboys and the traditional cowboys of the Old West, according to Chun, is that cybercowboys cannot survive without Japanese products.

Chun uses Ghost in the Shell, an anime, to demonstrate how cyberpunk has impacted the anime genres popular in Japan and the U.S. In both genres, an Asian landscape, traditionally either Japan or Hong Kong, is inhabited by people comprised of both human and computer parts living in a futuristic world in which everyone “has turned Japanese” (211). Interestingly, the characters in many anime works are not specifically Japanese, but rather Japanese characters with features they idealize from their western counterparts. These Japanese characters often have accentuated round eyes, red hair, long legs, and thin bodies (Chun 214). Often, the main characters of the anime genre, much like the cyberpunk genre, are females or transgendered males. Because of this orientation, characters are not jacking into cyberspace, but rather being jacked into by cyberspace. It is this concept, the freedom of intercourse provided when one is jacked into cyberspace, that is the ultimate protest of the legislators who posit the dangers of the Internet lie in the availability of “sex and pornography” on the Internet. Their true fear is not in this availability, but in the freedom of the intercourse, in all senses of the world, that takes place after one has jacked in.

Chapter Five: Control and Freedom

In Chapter five, Chun looks closely at the ideas of paranoia, freedom and control as they relate to the Internet. She first discusses Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage as a theory easily related to our real lives and e-lives. In this section, she discusses how e-lives are, in essence, a mirror of our own real identity and how we follow through the various stages of infatuation and jealousy with our e-lives much as we do with our mirror selves.

One of the strongest points that Chun makes in this chapter is the fact that paranoia stems from a desire to compensate for a perceived weakness in symbolic authority. While Chun scratches the surface with this idea it is easy to relate this to her earlier ideas on parents wanting to censor the internet so that their children don’t get access to them. Ultimately, the parents become paranoid because they do not have the authority to deny their children complete access to these sights. This theory can also be seen in companies who ban their employees from blogging or fire them when they discover they blog. There is not anything specifically wrong with their employees keeping a blog. The only problem behind this media is that the bosses have no control over what the employee is writing. Chun connects this idea of paranoi directly to William Burroughs’ concept that control occurs through words.
Chun’s next area of focus is that in the online world, doing something without being controlled is doing something “freely.” She relates this idea specifically to the idea of online porn web-cams and the girls who “act” for these cameras. These girls subvert the idea of a panopticon by asking users to place them under surveillance. Instead of being controlled by the voyeurs who watch these cameras, the girls exhibit their own freedom by deciding, often against the wishes of their voyeurs, what clothing to remove, how they will act and all other components of their actions on their own.