Cindy provides this account of yesterday’s adventure.
The schools in our region have agreed to form a consortium in order to secure prof. development resources from the state. They bring in some external “trainers” for some things and rely on local people for others. Cindy was a local person involved in providing sessions on new technology opportunities.
So – Cindy is doing a session on teacher and student blogging. Those of you who have done tech training in an unfamiliar setting can probably appreciate how this goes. She decides to begin by showing them a blog aggregator and explain how to locate and follow useful blogs. It turns out bloglines.com was blocked by the state filtering service.
“I tried showing the the blogspot site I created when I spent the summer in Japan,” she said. It was blocked. “I thought it might be an objection to blogger.com, so I tried showing them the .mac blog I created this summer. It was blocked too.”
“Maybe the Internet wasn’t working,” I volunteered.
“No, I was able to show them Anderson Cooper’s blog,” she replied.
“This makes no sense to me,” I said. “Do you think the group responsible for the banned list knows that Anderson Cooper works for CNN.” (previous caustic comment on filtering)
“Can’t you unblock sites.”
“Sure,” she responded. “But they can’t. They would have to locate the person that has that authority and ask that it be done. Teachers, particulalry those less interested in technology, often won’t do this. It works or it does not and they just move on.”
“So, what did you do to fill out the time allocated for your session.”
“I told them they had to speak up.”
