How private's private?

Should the use of communication tools in education take place in sterile, safe environments, or is this just setting kids up for an unrealistic expectation of what the real online world is like? What's the balance in achieving a "duty of care"? Is our duty of care to lock things down, keep it safe and not take responsibility outside school, or is our duty of care to look after children wherever they are and whenever they are there? If we do lock things down it appears to me that there are two things going on:

1. The kids have an unrealistic idea of what the real online world is like
2. The teachers believe that they can leave the kids loose online because it's 'safe'.

Update: I like David's point about riding bikes. I think my own view is that, too. Yanish has also pointed out that we would normally spend time riding along with our children on the road until they can do it alone - and even then there might be accidents. But I don't know how many teachers feel capable or enthusiastic behind accompanying their students on the web in this way.

Comments

[David Muir]

Are the two mutually exclusive? It could be like teaching children to ride a bike in the safety of the school playground so that they can be sfer when they go out on the main roads.

[David Muir]

Your point two is a serious problem. Again I can't remember where I saw it, but I read a comment recently from a teacher complaining that the children in the school knew how to get around the filters in the school to look at naughty things, but that they prevented him from using educationally valuable stuff like Flickr and blogs!

My worry (like yours I think) is that filters could give teachers a false sense of security. But an unsupervised, undirected, "go play on the Internet" instruction is daft whether or not filters are in place.

[Steve]

It is one of my pet hates - locking things down :( especially when the decisions are made corportately and not by educators.

I feel that one of my roles is to prepare students for life, if we give them a false environment all the time then they are in for a huge shock in the real world.

Most of our students are spending time on their pcs/macs at home every night - shouldn't we take some responsibility to educate our students how to function safely in the real world?

On the other hand I wouldn't want to expose my students to some of the more dubious parts of the net. What I would hope is that if they find something they believe they shouldn't then rather telling their mates, they feel that they can tell me.

At the end of the day we have to make a professional decision about what our students come face to face with in our classroom and there is a place to lock some things down, but lets do it for educational reasons.