This makes
cases where the people who run school systems assume that they are smarter,
cleverer and more knowledgeable than all of their students combined seem all
the more preposterous. Collectively, your students possess an amazing amount of
knowledge, and a frightening mutual ability to solve problems, work out puzzles
and generally outthink you. In the case of a security protocol or a lockout
code, you are essentially betting that you (or whoever wrote the code) are
smarter than the collective intelligence of hundreds or thousands of bright,
curious, imaginative people – and that’s just counting the smart kids. Which
makes the fact that students in Los Angeles required only a matter of days to
hack the iPads they were issued by the school district an event so obvious it’s
hard to imagine why nobody saw it coming from the beginning…
You can read
the NPR story about it here if you want to, but the facts seem clear enough.
The Los Angeles Unified School District signed a $30 million deal with Apple to
provide iPads to all of their students for use in a variety of digital and
distance learning applications, and then equipped the devices with software to
both allow the schools to track the location of each iPad and also to restrict
what web sites each unit could access. Less than a week later over 200 units
had been “hacked” to get around the restrictions, and unless the software
patches introduced this week are better than the original programming, there is
reason to believe that all of the rest of them will be before much longer. As a
teacher myself, I can’t even think of a bad metaphor for how obvious these
events are. A much better question, at least from a management standpoint, is
what are we going to do about it?
Keeping our
students off of restricted web sites isn’t really possible. If the government
would allow us to jam all wireless transmissions into and out of the classroom
we might be able to keep our students from updating their Facebook page while
we’re actually talking to them, but the FCC won’t even consider such an action,
and just asking nicely (or threatening to lower grades) does not appear to be
of much use. And, as the linked story makes very clear, if we take away the
official iPads our students will just turn to smart phones, tablets and other
devices they already have. It’s possible that if the District were to invest
enough money in encryption software they might be able to make the restriction
stick, but I can’t help thinking that’s just throwing good money after bad…
In a broader
context, of course, this whole situation mirrors the conflict between all
managers (who want to see more work getting done) and all workers (who want to
get paid as much money for as little work as possible). The District can’t
compel the students to spend all of their time, or even the time they are
supposed to be spending, in approved fashion, any more than a manager can. What
they can do is borrow the same standard most line managers use, which is simply
that if you work is completed (correctly) in the time required, then I don’t
care what else you’re doing or how you are spending your remaining time. It may
not be the authoritarian method of which the District seems so fond, and it
certainly won’t help them to establish or maintain discipline. But it’s
probably more effective in the long run than just giving all of the pads back
to Apple…
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