Janet Ward Schofield and Rebecca Eurich-Fulcer
Paper presented at the K-12 Panel of the 1994 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference, Chicago, March 26, 1994.
With regard to the first of these issues, the fundamental problem is that there is a lot of material available on the Internet which large portions of the citizenry might find objectionable. Sexually explicit material is perhaps the prime example of this. But objections have been raised to material on a wide range of other topics as well. There appear to be two major ways that educators have responded to the presence of a very wide range of material on the Internet. The first is by attempting to limit ready access to a subset of these materials deemed appropriate. The second is by requiring that students and their parents sign acceptable use policies. Such policies contain written pledges that the student will abide by certain rules when using Wide-Area Networking. Although acceptable use policies vary substantially in their length and the level of detail covered, most contain rules defining legitimate and illegitimate uses of the networking capability and the kinds of materials students will seek access to. Each of these two approaches will be discussed in turn.
The first of these two approaches, that of limiting access to certain kinds of materials, is hardly new. Public schools have a long history of dealing with issues relating to the selection of the materials they present to students, such as library books, texts, and audiovisual materials. One has only to think about the controversies that have arisen over the kinds of materials that should be included in textbooks to see that this is an extraordinarily volatile and contentious political issue. However, the situation with the electronic medium is not precisely the same. Several important differences exist between electronic materials available via the Internet and more traditional classroom materials. All of these differences challenge the standard operating procedures that have evolved over time, suggesting that new ways of thinking about these issues are needed.
First, when decisions are made about what texts to use and what materials to buy for the school library, it is possible to fully examine materials before deciding whether to make them available to students. However, it is impossible to fully examine Internet materials before allowing students to access them. First, many Internet resources are moving targets that change daily. Second, the scope of the resources that are potentially available makes any kind of routine monitoring quite impractical, even if one should decide that it is desirable. Third, the material that is contained in quite a large subset of these resources is relatively unpredictable. For example, bulletin boards on topics such as the impact of computers on society, which might be the kind of thing that a teacher would encourage students to read, could easily turn into fairly graphic discussions of sexuality in response to a posting by a reader who says that their exposure to the alt.sex discussion groups has affected his or her behavior. All this creates a situation in which educators may begin to feel uncomfortable because they are unable to be certain about what will be found in the materials that students can access using the Internet.
Another way in which the selection of electronic materials is different from the selection of traditional educational materials is that when a school district makes a decision about selecting texts, library books, or other educational materials, it has a fairly clear way of implementing that decision. That is, it purchases the materials it wants, and it does not purchase other material. However, the situation becomes considerably more complex with the Internet. Once students are given access to resources that the school might select for them, such as bulletin boards or certain search mechanisms, it becomes possible for students to go way beyond the kinds of resources the school intended them to have access to, and to gain access to a wide variety of other material. Thus, the school not only has less knowledge about the content of the resources that it provides to the students, but it also has less control over what students are going to be able to find. Once again, many individuals find this result worrisome.
A third way in which the selection of electronic materials differs from the selection of books is procedural. Because the selection of educational materials has historically been such a controversial political issue, school districts have developed detailed procedures related to how these materials should be chosen, and how individuals can go about objecting to selections should they wish to do so. For example, the American Library Association has a workbook on writing selection policies which is used by many school districts. This workbook suggests 13 criteria which should be used in weighing materials considered for selection, as well as a 9-step process for handling complaints about selected material. Although schools using Wide-Area Networks are grappling with these kinds of issues, procedures are frequently very much less developed. In fact, decisions relating to materials selection often seem to be made in a very ad-hoc manner.
Finally, some of the criteria used in the selection of other educational materials do not seem applicable to Wide-Area Networking. For instance, many school districts have selection policies that say that materials should not be purchased if better materials on the same topics are available. In many ways this stricture makes sense when the district is deciding which of several expensive reference works to buy and has a very limited budget. In contrast, this stricture does not seem reasonable when selecting electronic resources where the issue of per item cost is not a major one.
Another criterion that is often used in the selection of print materials in schools is that the material should be valid, accurate, and current. Although these qualities may be desirable in instructional materials, they are much harder to assess in electronic materials than they may be in more traditional library materials, since there are not well-developed systems of review like those available in the print world. In addition, it is not hard to imagine that very constructive use could be made of materials from the Internet or elsewhere which do not come near to meeting these stricter traditional criteria. For instance, high school students might want to compare assertions about the likely consequences of changes in the health care system made on bulletin boards whose topics or participants suggest very different perspectives on the issue. A part of the assignment might be to try to ascertain the degree to which these statements have a factual basis. Using accuracy as a criteria for inclusion reflects a kind of educational vision in which students are presented with material to be assimilated, rather than materials to be evaluated. Although the Internet has rich data bases that can supply much factual information, it also serves as a kind of modern day forum in which conflicting opinions are expressed and differing points of view are argued. Teaching students to evaluate the information they gain access to is likely to have to be a more important part of the learning process when students use the Internet than it has often been when students have gained their information primarily from textbooks or books in their school library.
Out of fear of the kinds of things that students might get exposed to, many school systems have severely limited what it means to have access to the Internet. For example, some systems use only e-mail because they do not want students to get into the wider world of resources on the Internet. Other schools restrict access to moderated bulletin boards, assuming that unmoderated ones are more likely to contain material to which they do not want their students exposed. However, such policies keep students from gaining access to a substantial amount of quite educational material as well so it is important to recognize that serious trade-offs are being made when one decides to limit access in these ways.
I will now turn to briefly discussing acceptable use policies, which were earlier mentioned as the second way that many schools react to their concern over the kinds of materials that are available on the Internet. As indicated earlier, acceptable use policies typically cover precisely the issues suggested by their names -- the kinds of behaviors that are acceptable, the purposes for which the connectivity is to be used, and the like. There are two issues regarding acceptable use policies which deserve some attention. The first is the question of whether students and their parents should be required to sign these policies before students are allowed to use Wide-Area Networking available in their classrooms. The argument starts with the assumption that parents have the right to determine what their children will be exposed to in school. According to this view, it is crucial to obtain parental permission before making the Internet available to students so that parents can decide whether or not they want their children to have a resource which contains materials which they may find very objectionable. The argument on the other side is that by asking parents' permission one creates a situation in which there may be a great deal of censorship and that free access to information is fundamental to the integrity of the educational process. In addition, there are likely to be severe logistical problems relating to how one educates those children who do not have permission to use this resource if most of their peers do.
A second issue concerns how explicit the acceptable use policies should be, assuming one decides to ask for parental permission for student access to the Internet. Some acceptable use policies go into great detail about the nature of the material that could be considered objectionable, based on the belief that it is important to fully inform parents. Others downplay this aspect of the Internet. Those in favor of this second approach argue that explicit discussion of the possibly objectionable material has the disadvantages of (a) actually increasing access to such material since highlighting its existence may encourage students to seek it out, (b) raising unnecessary concerns since students will be supervised by their teachers, and (c) virtually inviting political action to limit or eliminate Internet access when other solutions can be found to eliminate or minimize access to objectionable materials. Thus, this is another issue that schools planning for Internet connectivity have to decide about.
In addition to gaining potential access to a very wide range of information students connected to the Internet are empowered in other ways quite unusual in American education. They gain access to the possibility of reaching outside of the school's walls in ways not possible before and this raises a host of issues for educators. First, students connected to the Internet have the ability to interact with an extraordinary number of people from around the globe. The Internet, in fact, enables students to disregard the adage that many of them have learned at their mother's knee and in personal safety lessons in elementary school -- that is "Don't talk to strangers." It provides a mechanism that facilitates talking to strangers, and learning from them. There are an extraordinarily large number of possible benefits to be gained from this, since it can provide access to expertise and contact across economic, social, and geographic boundaries. However, school officials must find ways to deal with the downside of this opportunity -- the possibility that students may come into contact with strangers who may indeed either do them some kind of physical harm or expose them to ideas to which the school or their parents do not want them exposed.
The second issue connected with student's empowerment is that when the students in a given school are connected through the Internet to large numbers of people around the globe, educators may become especially concerned with their behavior because it is felt to reflect to some degree on that school to a potentially huge audience. This can raise contentious discussion about what is appropriate language for students to use and what kinds of material students should be allowed to send out over the Internet. One of the things that creates great potential for disagreement is that communication patterns on the Internet are often informal. This is true of both e-mail and Internet Relay Chat. Thus, students often appear predisposed to communicate in a way which is quite different from the more formal mode that typifies assignments they hand in to teachers. Yet school staff may be even more concerned about the language and content of these externally-directed communications because of the way they can reflect on the school and effect its image in the eyes of an external audience.
Schools have been in the business for a long time of trying to regulate students' behavior, although not always with great success, so one might say there is no new issue here. But the issue is, in fact, a real one. What happens is that when students are involved in these kinds of on-line interchanges, teachers may decide on a moment to moment basis not only whether they find the language or content acceptable themselves for within-class usage, but also whether the student is representing the school properly. In researching the impact of networking on classroom social processes, we have observed occasions when a teacher has literally interrupted Internet Relay Chat because of the kind of topic the student was discussing (e.g., homosexuality) made that teacher uncomfortable. Thus, students were exposed, in a very immediate way, to censorship of the expression of their ideas. Although it is certainly common practice for teachers to punish the use of certain kinds of language and to instruct students on what is proper material for classroom discussion, the nature of the standards the teacher uses and the teacher's power to enforce their standards may well both be effected by having electronic modes of communication available in the classroom.
Of course students connected to the Internet not only are able to communicate with other individuals, they have the potential capability of connecting themselves to vast numbers of computers all over the world. This raises issues related to how to keep students from using that access in inappropriate or illegal ways to cause problems for other computer users by disseminating viruses, by accessing private data bases, or the like. The two primary ways that schools currently seems to try to minimize or eliminate such problems are through supervision of students while using the Internet and through the acceptable use policies described earlier, which usually specifically prohibit such activities. However, each of these approaches is quite limited. As Internet use becomes more widespread it becomes impractical, even should it be desirable, for teachers to monitor everything students do. Furthermore, it seems reasonable to expect that over time more and more students will have access from home, where their work may not be monitored closely, most especially if the school has chosen not to be very explicit in its information to parents about the range of information that is potentially available should the student choose not to abide by the acceptable use policy. Some take the position that what happens outside the school is not its responsibility, even though the school has provided students with the knowledge that enables the activities. One could argue that holding the school responsible for damages outside of school activities on the Internet is like holding the school responsible when a student uses mathematical skills learned in school to embezzle money from an employer. Others argue that the school has the responsibility to try to reduce the chances of illegal or other activities that are damaging to the broader community by directly incorporating instruction about these issues along with other kinds of instruction on how to use the Internet.
In conclusion, individuals often think of Wide-Area Networking as a technical innovation, which it undoubtedly is. However, this innovation raises a large number of social, organizational, and ethical issues that need serious consideration. This paper has addressed two such sets of issues - one stemming from the wide variety of material available on the Internet and the other relating to the way in which Wide-Area Networking empowers students to interact with individuals and computers around the world. In this paper we have not tried to suggest solutions to all the problems isolated. Rather, our goal has been to raise these issues for the consideration of the broader community of people interested in and responsible for Wide-Area Networking in educational setting.