A great deal of discussion about filtering regarding Skype and Facebook has been filtering through the blogs lately.

Wesley Fryer has an excellent post on the subject, as do Jeff Utecht, Pat Hensley and Paul Wood.

This isn’t a new issue of course.  Two years ago at Educon 2.0, I presented a session on Best Practices and Internet Safety.  It’s not that we don’t have a lot of very good rationales for reducing filtering that are educationally sound.   But this struggle between IT departments and curriculum staff is an unfortunate but ongoing one in many districts.  We just need to understand each other better. 

But how do we bridge that gap?

I wonder if part of what we need to be doing is working with those who have the ability to effect change in this area. Of course within our own districts many of us try to do that.  But even beyond our district we can help effect change (sometimes more easily than within our districts because of the ‘prophet in our own home land’ issue).

How–?   By going to where the staff is who needs to hear this discussion.  We can do it by:

• Writing articles for journals read by IT staff, by administrators and superintendents
• Speaking at conferences they attend.  What conferences are IT staff attending?   What conferences are our administrators attending?
• Creating YouTube videos because some administrators find video more accessible than reading blogs or articles.
• Encouraging our conference organizers to invite not only edtech staff, but IT staff at schools–making sure that those staff get emails and flyers about upcoming Ed Tech conferences, scholarships to those conferences, etc. so that they have some exposure to ideas there.
• Encouraging professional journals that administrators or IT staff read to include articles on some examples of schools with great working relationships and how they have achieved that.
• Listening in on  IT department workshops.  Their concerns are legitimate and they are the ones left ‘holding the bag’ if a controversy erupts in a district.  Where can we go to listen to their concerns/discussions so we can come to some common understanding?  Too often our fundamental approaches are completely different and perhaps understanding is the first step.

And in our own building, I think we really need to invite the IT staff and administrators in–invite them to see us using that new tool with a class–let them see that excitement on the student faces and the constructive ways the tools are being used, live and in action.  Because perhaps what we each want is somehow a reflection of the other, we just aren’t seeing it.

I don’t know that any of these are new ideas, but I think we have to take this discussion out of the blogosphere “choir” and into the offices and meeting rooms and journals and conferences of the people who work on the filter on the daily basis.

One thing I was trying to do in my presentation at Educon was develop some type of Best Practices wiki with a list of resources that all of us could draw upon.  Sometimes filtering is just a matter of lack of knowledge about what the law actually says.   And it’s helpful when any of us are faced with difficult discussions in our own districts regarding filtering that we have resources to draw upon, rather than reinventing the wheel. 

We also have to remember that there will be early adopters and late adopters.  Like the mice in Who Moved My Cheese, there are districts that will be eager to change, and districts like the mouse Haw that will eventually figure it out and be glad for the change, and districts like Hem, that may not ever get it.

I know much of what I suggest is already happening, but I do think for those of us who haven’t tried writing an article for an IT publication or a principals’ journal could give it a try.  Think of the voices we could get out there if so many of us who write in the blogosphere committed to doing ‘one thing’ to communicate in another forum, like an IT conference? 

The first step towards opening doors is beginning the conversations with the players involved.  No change can occur without that  first step.

What else can we do?

photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/seagers/1805045379/