AIS IT Managers conference - Social networking

Michael Eggenheizen from The Kings School describes his institution's journey from dialup to a 50Mb pipe with minimal filtering, with over 1TB per month in downloads

Logs show top sites as facebook, siteadvisor, google, sports sites, big apple hits (lots of boys have iPhones)

Facebook highlighted as a problem, and they are discussing the blocking of Facebook during boarder's prep, but leaning towards education of students as to the positive and negative aspects. Logs revealed that most were using only for a few minutes to check, but there are 4 or 5 who are heavy users, who will be monitored more closely.

This last approach (education rather than punishing) is the approach he has been taking for some time, but it relies heavily on monitoring. This is changing the culture of the school.

He writes to boys if there is a pornography access transgression by students, pointing out that "there may be someone else using your account and you may want to change your password" requiring a response. This has been very successful and no one has been a repeat offender.

He uses a product called webspy to analyse logs and categorises them.

Some discussion ensues regarding how do we manage mobile devices. Interesting to see that so many in the audience ask the question anyway?

We move on to "why don't we block games?" and the audience polarises, smoothed by Michael when he talks about trust and education.

He points out that the HSC results in 2008 were the best so far. He points out that this isn't because of access, but opening of access hasn't caused problems (early days though)

Michale makes a good point that fast access through the school will discourage individual devices as they are comparatively slower.

Reinforces the idea that digital citizenship is really needed for teachers, students and parents, and that bandwidth is the currency or the 21st century.

PLC show their "Intenet Use and Web 2.0 guidelines" document. (bit of a weighty tome), then move onto examples of what has worked and what kids have liked.

Chris Betcher and Chris Waterman from PLC demo tag clouds, voicethreads and the use of FlickCC, where analysis and copyright are naturally woven.

Chris Waterman points out that "make a powerpont" is not a transferable skill, whereas "convince me of your point of view" is and is not locked to a specific application, adding that "our kids will be known by their digital footprint"