Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Fences or Free Access

I have been reading a lot of blog posts lately that deal with the possible legislation to ban access to a number of online communities. David Warlick's post: New Story Case in Point : DOPA provides rebuttles. Putting up walls will not keep students safe. It is education that will. If there is no access to the learning communities in school, students will go in their spare time from home when they are unsupervised. We need to make our students Internet savvy and to do that we need access. But I think it is even more than that. They need to learn to use the tools well. Insipid chats of Hi, what R U doing? can be replaced by blog entries or exchanges for deeper learning and understanding. Let them see the power of the tools.