Site@School: viewpoints

Contents

1. Introduction

2. On pedagogic views
    2.1 Protective pedagogies
    2.2 Esthetical pedagogies
    2.3 Society critical pedagogies
    2.4 Functional pedagogies

3 Where stands Site@School?
    3.1 A practical example

4. On form and content
    4.1 Cascading Style Sheets

5. On quick solutions

6. On OOP and PHP

7. Proofreaders

8. Concluding remarks

1. Introduction

Every tool reflects values; at first sight about it's usability, at second observation about it's design, at further inspection about the world-view of it's recreators and at it's deepest level views on nature and mankind.
Educational tools are no exception. They reflect notions about how education is seen, on pupils and how they learn and on pedagogy in general. And, also in the end, on nature and mankind.
It is, to say the least, surprising that most educational software comes with extensive documentation about which mouse movemnet to make, but lacks references to its pedagogical roots.
Covers that wrap gaming software tell us about the required adulthood (or lack of it) for the intended users, how we can ingeniously create empires or effecitvely slaughter the elderly. So we can make an informed choice on what is best for us. Why does software that is written for educational purposes not contain information about the pedagogical values it exports?

The team behind the Site@School Content Management System wants to be clear about its pedagogical views. In this text we will try to explain our known pedagogical assumptions and search for our hidden ones. That is, we have nothing to hide, but it might be the case that we are unaware of our own assumptions. Like the fish in the water, when asked about it says: "Water..? Never heard of."

2. On pedagogic views

In this section we explore where Site@School stands in it's pedagogical assumtions. To do this we first present a kind of framework which might serve as a touch stone for judging pedagogical aspects of materials used in education. Materials can be seen as software and hardware.

Below we devide pedagogical views in protective-, esthetical-, society critical- and functional pedagogical views. In the views below computers, the Internet, educational software, games etc. are seen as 'media' like film, television, textbooks etcetera.

2.1 Protective pedagogies

In these pedagogical views it is necessary to protect the young against the evils of modern media. In some religioius communities it leads to banning television, the Internet and computers altogether. In less strict communities it can lead to providing the pupils with antidotes in the form of materials demonstrating the badness or the superficiality of what a medium has to offer.

We have bad experiences with this pedagogical view. Besides what the school has to offer or refuse, pupils also have a home with a TV set and a computer with an Internet connection. Most times there is little or no parential surveillance or guidance. The parents do not even know what exactly could or should be surveilled.

2.2 Esthetic pedagogical views

Actually, this the hidden agenda of first view. In short it says: "The Internet is bad place to be, however there are some good sides (sites in this case) at it".
This leads to things like:
- The proxyserver only permits the 'good' sites. The rules of the proxyserver are definde by the teachers or a company is payed to set (whose?) rules.
- The normal desktop, whatever that might be, is too complicated and has too many options. Pupils need a specially designed simplified desktop. The Dutch IT company 'Station to Station' is a good example. Everything is banned except the applications that are allowed.

This pedagogy leads to to 'Cops and Robbers'. The teachers fence the school and and the pupils try to find the holes in the firewall. When found, fun really starts with attempts to bypass the proxyserver, sneaky downloads and visiting undesirable (by whose definition?) sites.
The pedagogical view has little respect for the the natual inquiring tendency of children in general and pupils in special.

Ofcourse the problem with this pedagical view is to find acceptable definitions of 'good' and 'bad'. Sooner than you think you are in the nands of 'authorities' who know what is 'best' for you and your pupils. Managing the proxyserver is time consuming and special companies will do this for you, of course for a 'reasonable' fee per month per pupil. Why should pupils have a special desktop? At home they have a desktop that can do everything. Learning a special desktop is a wase of time and money. Station to Station asks a ot of Euros per workstation for a mutilated desktop.
By the way, there is something strange in the notion of the Station to Station desktop when observing the request from schools to have Windows XP on the workstations, with the argument "That's what they (and we) have at home".

2.3 Society critical padagogical views

These views focus on the relations between media and society. The media are a cultural industry that help to maintain the existing social structure. The new media and the Internet reflect existing social relations.
The media are an important means for leisure and to promote an image of reality in which certain values are depicted as good, unavoidable and unchangebable.

It can lead to uncritical notions about media and technique, promoting value-free notions on technique. "There is no politics in a computer, and the Internet is a reflection of us all".

Another problem is that this notion can easily lead to uncritical acceptance of 'another' view; a revolution for example, be it a Marxist or a social. Resistance against a complete turnover of society prevents the complete commercial exploitation of the Internet as well as it prevents better education for those who need it most.

2.4 Functional pedagogies

This is a notiion that slightly differs from the previous ones. There are normative values when the media are at stake but the point of focus is the role the media play in the lives of the pupils. At the heart is a positive evaluation of the own culture and that of the pupils. It leads to questions about which sites are visited, which games are played, which TV stuff is watched, what magazines read and why. The user value of the media are the focussing point. Which functions do the media fullfill for the pupils and the way these are performed.
To discover these funcitons pupils can do research facilitated by teachers and question themeselves on the media they consume.

Of course, the the day-to-day practice of school life these pedagogies occur in mixed forms. We think the conbination of 2.3 and 2.4 attractive.
The combination makes it possible to educate critical civilians (the Dutch state asks for it) and to accept the differences in cultures and in pupils.

There is yet another choice to make; between receptive and productive use of media and their combination. Len Matersam's seminal work "Teaching the Media" [1] is a fine example of a completely worked out method for receptive media education.
Media Action Projects is an example of productive media usage. In mediapedagogical viewpoints both "Teaching the media" and "Media Action Projects" can be seen as examples of 2.3 and 2.4.
Len Masterman's "Teaching the Media" can be found on the Media Action Projects site as a summary.
[1] Len's book is reprinted! See http://gpn.unl.edu/cml/cml_product.asp?catalog_name=GPN&product_id=1504.

3. Where stands Site@SChool?

In my previous employment the most interesting results in terms of learning experiences, happily learing pupils, enthousiastic teachers, supportive parents and endorsement by the Educational Inspection were archieved with the conbination of critical and functional pedagogical notions as explained earlier.

3.1 A practical example

In stead of a lengthy theoretical explanation of the pedagogical position of Site@School, let's make this discussion practical. We take the guestbook module as example.

The guestbook module permits visitors on the site to leave a message. The visitor is asked to give her e-mail address and URL (if exists) and to enter a message. The e-mail address is shown in an unharvestable way, i.e. for wample yourmane (at) provier (dot) org.
Whenever a visitor makes an entry in the guestbook an e-mail alert is sent to the guestbook administrator. Here is an example of such an alert:

Date: 21-03-2005 - 10:23:07
Name: Monica James
Email: mjames@someprovider.com
Website: http://I do not have a website

Text: Hi All, 
Nice site! I was pupil at your school in 1990. 
Is master Frits still there? 
Best wishes to him. I\'m now living in Australia. 
Had a great time at your school. 
Monica James-van Rossem 
 
IP: 172.17.105.210 

Monica's inpupt is emphasized in the example. Observe that the mail to the guestbook administrator contains the exact time and the IP address the guestbook entry is sent from.
When the guestbook administrator receives an undesired mail, she can immeditely take action, i.e. remove the entry from the site and still have the mail with the content.

Up to recently everyone was happy with this guestbook. We onece received an unwanted entry which we could trace down to a school; even to the pupils that made the entry. With the help of the 'other school a pedagogical issue could be made and the pupils in question learned from it as they expressed by making a new entry in the guestboo and apologising for their action.
So far, so good.

Recently we received a feature request: "Would it be possible to have the admin check the entry before publication?"
At first glance, this seems a reasonable request. It prevents undesired entries on the site anyway.
However, in our opinion, there are a few pedagogical considerations to this request that, in the end and after long discussions, led to it's rejection.
These are the arguments so far:

We can already hear the feature requester's voice: "Can you make it configurable, so we can decide what to do?"
Again, a reasonable request. However, at that moment the pedagogical views of the makers of Site@School enter stage. We are not value free software developers that make what education asks. As long as there exist oppressive forms of education, forms that promote straight lies, that exclude 'other' visions and values, we cannot do without taking a position in the debate. This position is expressed in every feature or option and its design.
Our ideas at this moment are:

Karin, our ICT coordinator, on the 12th of September 2005 in Forum:
In the three years that we use S@S and the guest book in our school we have had only five entries that we deleted because of their bad content. In all five cases the writers have been caught and were confronted with their bad behaviour. Because the guest book sends alerts and we check our mail daily, an inappropriate message will not be visible for long (in our case: from one hour to half a day).
We have been able to educate the wrongdoers because we check the guest book AFTER a message has been posted. Up 'till now the management of my school finds, that checking the alerts regularly is enough to keep the guest book clean.
Karin

Karin adds to this in a mail:
Gentlemen,
I did write something in the Forum. It does not mean that I agree on Dirk. I only wanted to explain how we deal with these matters and how we manage the guestbook. We have always found the 'wrongdoers' and have been able to educate them, also due to the good policy of our principals.
However, when we would get an attach by Russian spammers, and I would have to manage the guestbook for a weekend, I woiuld sing another song.

Ah, btw
I am very much against giving management tasks of the guestbook to pupils. It can be done under good guidance of an adult, becaause, which norms are used when judging entries. This wold not fit in our ICT policy.
This discussion is not yet closed.

Choosing to make the feature not configurable is a choice for a critical and functional pedagogy.

Another voice says: "But in the pupils pages you do have this option, so you are not straight in line yourselves".
On which we say the following. There is a big difference in these features. On the pupils pages the teacher knows her pupils and makes an informed judgement based on, maybe discussion, maybe autthority, deserved or undeserved, etcetera. However, she is in direct contact with the one's the use of the feature will affect.
In the guestbook it's different. Most times the people who put undesired entries in the guestbook do not want to be known, because of the language they use in the entries. But that is not an excuse to deny them access. You give them access but you manage it. Or you remove the guestbook, which is also an option. We have done that for some time and we did not feel it was a bad idea.
Our point is that one should not opt for a technical solution where obviously a non-technical problem is at stake.

To be continued, because there are more arguments. And, technology is not value free. It reflects the values and ethics of its designers.

Our conclusion so far: both feature requests are counter productive to educational goals.

4. On form and content

4.1 Cascading Style Sheets

CSS is a toptic that regularly shows up in the S@S4US Forum. One user asks for CSS and in no time a couple of others endorse the request and join the chorus. After some time the subject is dropped till it is taken up again.
We have not (yet?) incorporated CSS in Site@SChool because we think it's a highly problematic issue in a content management system specially designed for primary schools.

To begin exploring the matter, let us start with a lengty quotation from:
HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide
4th Edition by Bill Kennedy and Chuck Musciano
Published by O'Reilly, Sebastopol 2000
ISBN: 0-596-00026-X

Mr. Fokker questioned: "A definitve guide in its fourth edition? A strange contradiction"
Chapter 8 is on cascading stylesheets begins with:

Style sheets are the way publishing professionals manage the overall "look" of their publications —backgrounds, fonts, colors, and so on— from a single page to huge collections of documents. Most desktop publishing software support style sheets, as do the popular word processors. All desktop publishers and graphic designers worth their salt are out there making web pages. So the cry-to-arms was inevitable: "Whaddaya mean HTML has no style sheets?!"

From its origins, HTML focused on content over style. Authors are encouraged to worry about providing high quality information and leave it to the browser to worry about presentation. We strongly urge you, too —as we do throughout this book— to adopt that philosophy in your documents, especially those destined for the World Wide Web. Don't mistake style for substance.

However, while use of the <font> tag and related attributes like color produce acute presentation effects, style sheets, when judiciously applied, bring consistency and order to whole document collections, as weIl as to indivîdual documents. Remember, too, that presentation is for the benefit of the reader. Even the original designers of HTML understood the interplay between style and readability. For instance, readers can quickly identify section heads in a document when they are enclosed in header tags like <h2>, which the modern browsers present in large and often bold type. Style sheets extend that presentation with several additional effects, including colors, a wider selection of fonts, even sounds so that users can even better distinguish elements of your document. But most importantly, style sheets let you control the presentation attributes for all the tags in a document-for a single document or a whole collection of many documents, and from a single master.

So far the lengthy quotation. We would like to draw attention to the following points in the three paragraphs.
In the first paragraph the web professionals show up. It seems they specially like CSS. That's understandable. CSS might give pages a professional look, thus supporting the professional himself in his role. Furthermore CSS might as well be a time and money saver; an important aspect of professionalism.
Primary schools have different objectives with their websites. One of them, and not the least, might be an educational objective. This objective might lead to a approach on professionalism that has its own professional standards that differ from those of web professionals.

The second paragraph cuts a lot deeper. It tell us to put our emphasis on content, not on form. HTML in conjunction with the browser gives us enough tools to handle form. CSS prevents us from thinking about form because the thinking is already done for us. When education is about aquiring skills, the skill of putting content in a suitable form is part of the skills needed to produce texts.

The third paragraph deals with control. The control of the form is handed over to the style sheet in stead of being in the hands of the writer(s).
There is a deep truth in architect Sullivan's words that "form ever follows function". A school seems one entity. In reality it is a hetergenous company (Gesellschaft). In that company CSS is a Procrustes bed with the webmaster in the role of the modern innkeeper.

A severe theoretical objection against CSS might be 'the differend', as understood by the French postmodern philosopher François Lyotard.
What is 'postmodern'? There are many definitions on Wikipedia from which we take one:

A worldview that emphasizes the existence of different worldviews and concepts of reality, rather than one "correct or true" one. Whereas modernism emphasized a trust in the empirical scientific method, and a distrust and lack of faith in ideologies and religious beliefs that could not be tested using scientific methods; postmodernism emphasizes that a particular reality is a social construction by a particular group, community, or class of persons..
www.greeleynet.com/~cnotess/gloss.htm

When we look at CSS from a postmodern perspecitve CSS is the embodiment of the 'truth'. However, this truth is not plainly postulated as in good old positivism, but it hides itself in a single style. One style throughout a site is (silently) posing there is only one truth, the one that is spoken by the style. The style massages the differing contents thus making them more alike.
By adopting CSS other (metalinguistic) discourses are implicitly rejected. Only with the greatest effort a web author can free herself from the usurpation of a style sheet.

The style sheet can be seen as the 'grand theory', obstructing the legitimacy of the performative, of "small" narratives, of the multiplicity and heterogeneity of language and the existence of knowledges. In plain words pupils and teachers are individuals that have their own (differing) rights on differing forms of expression. In content ofcourse, but since CSS is at stake, also in form.

To be continued.

5. On quick solutions

Of course, there are urgent problems that need quick solutions. When a secuity hole is found or a bug, the first one asks for a quick fix, the second one for a less quicker solution.
However, when the leak is above the water line, even these urgent and quick fixes need rethinking and/or careful inspection of the code. In what way does the fix affect other code? In what way is the fix opening other vulnerabilities?

Besides these considerations, there are others of a more substantial nature. A quick solution can prevent a good solution. By making a quick fix to a problem the thinking process on a good solution gets a bad start. Because of the quick fix, the pressure from the users diminishes. This diminishes the urge for a good solution. You keep your ysers happy, at least for the moment.

There is something strange at stake when immediately fullfilling user requests. In an educational environment a teacher does not change a reading method when she has two pupils in the class that have reading difficulties. You help them individually and leave the method intact.

A quick solution prevents thinking about a good solution. There is no incentive to chew on the problem and think it through in all its aspects. A quick technical solution prevents a breakthrough in practical and theoretical views.

6. On PHP and OOP

Another issue that reflects Site@Schools views on education is the 'Object Oriented Programming' issue. A long time ago the first Site@School developer proposed to program in OOP.
We have nothing against OOP but we rejected this idea for educational reasons. In those days the S@S forum was manily populated by users asking questins. We had the feeling that the PHP language was easier accessible for the users and that this, after some time, would result in users contributing code to the project. This is happening. Site@School might also be a learning experience in itself. We would never have had this experience if we had switched to OOP.

7. Proofreaders

When the manual for the 2.3 version was ready, a teacher from Florida offered help in proofreading. After some e-mail exchanges we decided that proofreading the manual would be a very good piece of real work for eight grade pupils. Thus decided, about 8 pupils proofread the manual. Not only are we very grateful. Users have a better manual. This experience also demonstrates Site@School's view on education. We think it important that pupils do real work, make a real contribution to the world.

8. Concluding remarks

This is 'work in progress'. We keep thinking about Site@School. We keep listenin to its users; our 'customers'. We hope they appreciate our standards in which the customer is not the king but education itself.

Author: Dirk Schouten <schoutdi (at) knoware (dot) nl>
Last updated: 2006-04-18