DIT Bits

It’s a candy mint! It’s a breath mint! It’s two, two, two mints in one!

I’m dating myself with this ad reference from many years ago, but I thought of it recently while reading a thread on a tech listserv. In a lively exchange, two subscribers disagreed about how tightly desktop security features should be locked down for student and teacher computer users, a familiar theme in K-12 IT.

A technology support manager argued that all school computers should be locked down as tightly as possible to minimize legal risks to the school, keep support costs low, and maximize computer up time. No one but tech staff should be allowed full admin rights to the computer, and permissions that were granted should be extremely limited.

The other subscriber, also a school tech person, argued that the computers should be as wide open as possible. When things went wrong, or poor decisions were made, seizing these “teachable moments” created an opportunity for authentic learning. The value gained from these moments far outweighs the cost of down time and disruption.

Is this a classic debate? You bet it is. And people like me end up bouncing back and forth between two parallel universes.

When we run business-like tech operations, people comment that we are not enough like a school. When we run school-like tech operations, people comment that we are not enough like a business.

I look at our $30 million operating budget for the school, the sophisticated admin data systems, and all the infrastructure behind the scenes and go, “Yup, it’s a business.” I go into my old Kindergarten classroom and watch a youngster make something cool in KidPix and go, “Yup, it’s a school.”

It would be easier to come down on one side or the other if there weren’t sobering realities present in both points of view. Truth is, like Certs, it’s both, and there will be some areas in which these very different environments simply cannot be reconciled to everyone’s satisfaction. The best we can do is to eliminate as many of these irreconcilable areas as possible by communicating well and figuring out what we can all live with when we can’t all have everything we want. Empowering individuals while protecting the institution is a very tricky business, much more subtle and tangled up in its gory details than this veteran teacher and ex-hippie ever wanted to believe.

There is a lot of room in school tech operations to be more communicative and transparent about how we navigate this twilight zone since many of the people we work with outside our tech departments don’t really understand what we do every day. When you actually share this with people in an accessible way, framing the challenges and opportunities before us in terms of universal dilemmas everyone understands, it’s surprising how responsive they can be and how conversations about such things begin to evolve into a more collaborative, constructive dialogue with a much-improved outcome.

Posted on August 15th, 2007 by Curt Lieneck
Filed under: Uncategorized