Getting Priorities Straight

The Ontario Meetup last night inspired a great deal of conversation. As happens with most conversations, we wandered off the track eventually but it was a good wander.

The original focus, led by our presenter @courosa, was around the concept of internet filtering. Alec made a comment right off the bat about social media and its use that I thought was good and tweetworthy.

We spent some time talking about the good – then it turned to the bad – then it turned to the ugly. The general thought going through our Adobe Connect room was that we are all wrestling and dealing with the issue of internet filtering. We ran the gamut from no filtering whatsoever to overly tight filtering (at least from the perspective of the commenter).

I find it so amazing that, in a day and age of standards and standardized curriculum, that we can be miles apart in implementation as a province.

There were a couple of comments that stuck in my mind because they resonated well with me. @ron_mill asked the question as to why we build our policies around the outliers.

I think that @sadone summed it up when he noted that it’s our job as educators to teach the right and wrong and that we should be building a moral sense of appropriateness in internet use.

It’s difficult to argue with that logic. I think that’s what we all like to think that we do for a living as teachers.

But, it’s those outliers. Education has a long memory. When you have these sorts of discussions, there’s always someone who remembers how bad it was when … The Ontario College of Teachers has its blue pages. There are fodder that keep being offered up when you try to have the discussion.

They are all good discussion points. @markwcarbone and I have these discussions all the time. From what we can see, there’s a real tightrop to be walked to reach the other side and keep the organization’s needs and the needs of the end user in balance.

It was a good session and like most good sessions generated more questions than answers. Everyone has their priorities on this issue and getting the right answer is important.

The discussion isn’t going to end any time soon. The key is that we had over 30 people in the conversation at one point last night. That’s great that we have that many people willing to discuss it.

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