As part of the young Canadians project, we talked to 10 key informant teachers across the country, so I actually have good data on this. They perceive it as a privacy issue, because when the walls of the classroom become transparent, you lose the ability to create a safe space where kids can make mistakes, explore, and learn, effectively. In addition, there are all sorts of problems that happen when kids surreptitiously take tapes of what is happening in the classroom and post them online. It changes the dynamic significantly.
Uniformly, the teachers we talked to all indicate that the solution was not to get rid of the technology. In fact, that has been our knee-jerk reaction—“Oh, we don't like this, so let's just shut it down”. Social networking and these types of tools can really deepen kids' education, and I have a report of incredible best practices to justify that.
However, what they told us is that the real problem is that the schools are taking this approach and they're banning things. If they do allow kids to go online, they place them under total surveillance. By doing that, they also place the teachers under surveillance. What that does is shut down the opportunity to be that caring adult beside the kid when they do run into trouble or when they say, “Hey, this looks like a kind of a wingy site”, and the teacher can go over and go, “Yes, that's a hate site”.
So those teachable moments where we can give kids true digital literacy skills are shut down by not embracing the technology. But at the same time, I would stress that it is a privacy issue.