WHEN A SCHOOL TEACHER friend showed me one of the little netbook computers the NSW education department is handing out to secondary students, three thoughts crossed my mind.
The first was that these are underpowered machines with cramped keyboards that would be difficult for adults to use continually unless they had small hands, but not necessarily so for students.
The second thought was that students would simply get around the blocked websites and running unauthorised software on their school-issued netbooks by using their own computers at home. I asked my friend about this and he said that this would be done out of school and not using school-issued computers, therefore it was beyond their control. I realised that it was not inappropriate content or the like that the education department was interested in, despite what they might claim; this was no more than an attempt to cover their own behinds by preventing access through a technology that they had made available, putting the blame on the students and their parents.
My third thought was that because the software is locked down and students cannot load their own, it would be sooner rather than later that the more innovative among them would start to hack the machines. That happened sooner than I would have anticipated and now students are sharing the information on social networking sites, according to reports in the popular press, and education bureaucrats are monitoring sites to spy on what their students are saying.
Encouraging innovation and protecting students
Recalling that some of the most innovative and commercially successful people in the IT industry started their careers as hackers, and that the industry has developed thanks to the intellectual freedom of the techno-liberterianism that fostered it, I wondered how the state education bureaucracy would react when students started to get around the barriers their IT people had put in place to lock down the computers. Would they recognise that reality that tinkering is part of the learning process of innovators, that the more innovative among the students would see a locked down computer as a challenge?
Of course not. They reacted with threats of punishing the students in the way that has become so typical of government and its anonymous legion of bureaucrats. As someone once told me, governments and their public service bureaucracies are there to maintain the status quo, to keep things running as they are; they are not rewarded to introduce change and innovation or to think in that way. This is not a criticism of people who work for the public service (except for those who make the major decisions); it is a critique of our secretive and managerial public service culture, that which stifles rather than innovates.
The departmental reaction is little more than a colossal collapse of imagination, but will it stem the drive of student hackers to gain control of their computers? Of course not. Why not? Because the drive to learn, to change, is stronger than any sanctions imposed by a government department. That’s the lesson of the IT industry and of the commercial success of some who started what are now its leading companies.
A more imaginative response in needed to those student hackers… some other way to encourage their curiousity that does not send them along more dangerous paths because the easy ones have been closed.
