StigmergicWeb

{begin sarcasm}Oh how I do love the lockdown on my ability to customize my account with our new Windows computer system at my school. I’m so happy that the IT folks are preventing me and my students from doing useful things that might interfere with their ability to manage the system. We wouldn’t want students’ learning to interfere with their system, would we?{end sarcasm}

I am feeling loathing towards our school division system administrators right now, and very bad words are prominent in my inner monologue. The reason - Google Notebook. Google Notebook itself is not the cause of my loathing, merely a symptom. I think that Google Notebook is a terrific research tool. I would love to be able to introduce it as a resource for the students and other staff here at the school. My favourite feature of GN is the extension that allows highlighted section of text on a web page to be clipped and added to a notebook along with the address of the web page it came from. The notebooks can be shared or published so that teachers are able to follow along the process of a student’s research. This is a great tool from Google, and one that too few people (especially students and teachers) know about.

But I can’t install the extension on IE on our system. I don’t have the rights to add an extension to my browser. I’m not surprised about this, considering the control issues of the current IT regime. So, being a resourceful and geeky kind of guy, I thought I thwart the IT guys by running the portable version of Firefox, which runs off a USB drive. I could then install the notebook extension.

Alas, this does not work. I have other apps on my USB drive - Skype, PuTTY and Opera (which I am currently running) and others which all run just tickety-boo. Firefox seems to be singled out and prevented from funning running (Oops - apparently I was too upset to type correctly). I can’t install the GN extension on IE, and I can’t run Firefox. These are the only two browsers that support the plugin. I can still use GN, but without the extension it is only flying on one wing.

As an isolated event, this is an inconvenience to me. But it’s not just an isolated event. It also prevents teachers and students from using a wonerfully useful research tool to its fullest. It is symptomatic of an unfortunate fact in many school divisions that education is secondary to the demands of the IT department. If that’s not a case of the tail wagging the dog, I don’t know what is. When that happens, something is seriously wrong with the system.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 12:13 and is filed under educational technology, open thinking, learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.