I was just going through the ALA Annual conference web site this morning and discovered the paragraph below. This could be a trend. Better yet, this could be a movement. OK, most of you don’t get the reference to Alice’s Restaurant, but it’s huge.Â
ALA
has contracted with the Morial Convention Center to provide wifi access
at the Annual Conference. This access will be available to all users,
(councillors and attendees), for the duration of the event. Wifi
coverage is available throughout the building with the exception of the
exhibit halls.
ALA | ALA Annual Conference General Info
There seems to be a growing recognizable that our access to digital networked information is something that we need to have with us, even in those information endeavors that are as traditionally based as conferences. Might classrooms be next?
I’m flying to Atlanta this afternoon where I’ll be kicking off a staff development symposium for the Discover Educator Network (DEN). I have already worked one of these, and they are great fun. All of the attendees are DEN members, so they are educators who have distinguished themselves, in some way, by integrating something into their classrooms that involves new technologies.
I’ll be trying to help the attendees to understand the underpinnings of Web 2.0, its constituent parts, and the family of applications that they comprise — evangelizing. Then they’ll go out and blog and make podcasts for the rest of the symposium.
I’ll fly home after that for a few days, and then off for ALA to speak at the AASL President’s program about the flattening world, flattening web, and our flattening schools. With access to WiFi at the conference and ALA’s extensive usage of blogging and wikis, I want to suggest that goers tag their blogs and photos with:
   ala06
That’s a-l-a-(zero)-6.
After ALA, I’ll be going to Connecticut to keynote a conference for independent schools in that state (please tag entries: cais06) and then on for a conference in Wisconsin. I’ll talk more about these conferences later. It simply appears that my days off for the early summer — are over. Hope to see you on the road somewhere.
technorati tags:ala06, cais06, discoveryeducatornetwork
Blogged with Flock
Wifi in schools? I’m not so sure. My IT department frowns on it. They are very afraid someone will park outside a school and hack into the network. I have a wireless network provided by 3 original Apple Airports that the IT department “gave permission” to be on the network 6 years ago and so have forgotten about (although the building where they do some teacher inservice has wireless – I’ve never seen anyone use it, I noticed it once when my laptop was there and asked if I wanted to join the network). I do inservice classes from time to time on my school’s now 7 year old keylime green iBooks and have teachers that didn’t realize you could connect that way – like they just invented wireless a few months ago. It seems I’ve heard teachers from other locales voice the same IT objection. In my district this effects about 65,000 students.
Brian, I love your blog and respect your thoughts and writings. So please do not misconstrue my response here. But this is the only response I can think of:
How long are we going to be able to keep the Information a secret?
The sentiments that you express are those of the gatekeeper, guarding the gate and protecting the information. Certainly there are information and infrastructure security issues, not to mention the safety of our children. But I wonder how long our constrained classrooms will remain relevant to our children as they go home and IM, play games in virtual shared worlds, blog, search and surf the Net, and otherwise enjoy an open and rich information landscape. Sure people will sit on the school lawn and access the network. But shouldn’t it be any librarians dream to have a library open 24/7?
Again, security is an issue. But we’ve got some pretty bright people out there. We should be able to solve this problem. And in so doing, in what part of the curriculum do we teach our children the ethical use of digital networked information. When and where are we teaching them right and wrong on the information highway?
Thanks for the post, Brian!
— dave —
If an IT department in a school of 65,000 cannot secure their wireless access, there is something wrong. There are some basic simple ways to provide wireless access securely:
1. Turn off the broadcast SSID, this stops the wireless from showing up when someone opens their laptop. (Security by obscurity isn’t the best, but it’s a start! 🙂
2. Turn on WPA encryption.
3. Put the wireless on their own VLAN where it doesn’t have access to internal resources. You can combine this with VPN access so authenticated users can access the internal network. This step requires some knowledge to setup.
Security is not an excuse not to offer wifi access, and the first two options don’t cost any more money (unless the wifi equipment doesn’t support WPA. Then you’re stuck with WEP, which is not totally secure.)
Dave, I agree with you – my point is that we are trying to increase awareness and use of wireless and web 2.0 etc. but IT has so much control over what we can and can’t do. Their fears tend to get priority – I’ve had to shut-up to a certain degree in my district because I advocate for access while IT advocates for security and they have news reports that rely on peoples fears to get ratings (i.e, the whole Myspace issue, current, multiple stories on net sex predators, etc.). How many administrators are going to buck that much public sentiment that the web is something to fear? How many school boards?
The good news is I do see some light at the end of the tunnel. My current principal has green lighted a pilot 1:1 laptop program in my 4th grade class next year. We are getting new HP laptops at our school through a grant so I will be allowed to use our still working 7 year old iBook laptops to do my program. I’ll be blogging about that some more this summer. I hope class blogmiester will run on them!?
Brian, you didn’t say what OS you’re running on the iBooks, but there are some alternative browsers you can try out if Internet Explorer won’t work correctly:
1. Opera, version 5 will run on OS 7.5-OS 9, version 6 requires OS 9.
2. There’s an unofficial build of Mozilla 1.3.1 here:
http://www.t3.rim.or.jp/~harunaga/mozilla-macos9/
I’ve just noticed IE on Mac really doesn’t do some of the CSS that more and more websites are using.