I’m tired of hearing (mostly on Twitter) about amazing, progressive and innovative teachers having to do their work in spite of their school or district IT departments.  IT departments should be enablers of technology use in a school, not trying to prevent it from happening.

Control, in the sense of school-wide IT policies and restrictions, really means supportability and security. The only reason these policies are really placed is that the less variables you have in a technology infrastructure the less you have to support, maintain and secure. Homogeneous is good in this sense. However, control limits freedom, which limits creativity, and in a time when the world is focusing on how to improve education, is this really what we want to be doing?

In a school setting, locking down teacher and student laptops, filtering the internet, etc. simply means you will not get the net benefit out of your technology investments.  You will not see any improvement in the way teaching and learning happens.  There are amazing creative teachers out there that know far more about using technology in the classroom than IT professionals. 

Standards, supporting and security are definitely important so how do we strike the balance between supportability/security and freedom in a technology infrastructure?  Here are a few points I’ve learned:

• IT departments must understand that a little user freedom is not the end of the world.  Many colleagues are shocked at the level of freedom we give to our teachers and students at our school.  But they also are shocked that we actually don’t have tons of problems caused by it.
• Cater to the user’s that need the support and give freedom to those who don’t.  Have a set of applications that are official, supported and promoted but allow people to use others if they desire.
• If users constantly attempt to go around standards, perhaps the standards aren’t good enough. Solutions provided should provide enough value for people to want to use them. If not, then you need to question whether the value is there and respond accordingly.
• Use passive monitoring:  If you must, monitor Internet use and applications installed and deal with abusers individually and directly instead of restricting the whole community.  It probably takes less time overall than administering a tightly locked down environment.
• Instead of forcing, try convincing.  It’s more effort but it’s worth it in the long run.

I am well familiar with the complexities of supporting and maintaining any IT infrastructure.  Total user freedom while maintaining budget and availability is a difficult thing to achieve and many cases may not be desirable.  However, we must understand the negative implications of restrictive IT policies on creativity, innovation and adaptibility, especially in an educational context.

We need to collectively let the reins out.  I’ve been an IT Director in a school for the last decade.  750 students and 110 teachers all with laptops, all with full administrative rights and no Internet filtering.  It is FAR from the total anarchy you might imagine.  Sometimes it might be a little more work, but it’s worth the effort overall.

• How do you balance innovation with standardization in a school?  You want to have and encourage innovative teachers but there does need to be a common experience for students both across sections and across courses within a school.
• Cloud services – huge wave hitting IT across industries…  where is it going and how will schools ultimately benefit from them?
• Google Apps For Education vs. Microsoft Live @ EDU – both are very attractive offerings for schools (especially considering the price tag).  What’s the better offering?  Will one win out?
• Frictionless collaboration – see this amazing post by Andy McAfee (a blog on Web 2.0 worth following) for more details
• Microblogging tools like Twitter and Yammer- how can these change / improve collaboration within an organization?

I have more questions than answers these days but hopefully over the next while I can post some thoughts and results from my ongoing research.