Tuesday, January 29, 2008

troubling thoughts need Shakespeare

Feeling a bit like Claudius today:

O, my silence is rank, it smells to heaven;
It hath the tech administrators curse upon't:

A working proxy.

Speak can I not,
Though professional obligation be as sharp as will,
My stronger 21st Century educator defeats my AUP-policy self;
And, like a tech coach to a flat-world bound,
I stand complicit where I shall first begin,

What if this cursed proxy
Were employed to access educationally appropriate material?
Is there not firewall enough in the sweet filters
To preserve it white like the snow?

And what's in silence but this dreaded complicity,
To be forestalled ere we come to fall,
Or pardon'd being down?

Then I'll look up;
My chosen path of ignorance is past. But, O, what form of silence
Can serve my turn? 'Forgive me my foul proxy awareness'?

That cannot be; since students and I still possess
The knowledge for which they did use the proxy,
May one be pardon'd and retain the access to Facebook?

In the corrupted currents of this educational landscape
Offence's gilded hand may lay taciturn, allowing appropriate use of social networking sites,
And oft 'tis seen that wicked access itself,
Increases student learning:

But 'tis not so in tech administration;
There is no shuffling, there the action lies
In its true non-compliant nature; and we ourselves compell'd,
Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults,
To give in the URLs.

What then? what rests?
Try what silence can: what can it not?
Yet what can it when one can not foster an open dialog about information access?

O wretched AUP! O proxy black as death!
O 21st Century soul, that, struggling to unblock,
Art more engaged!
Help, network managers! Make assay!

Bow, stubborn knees; and blog, with strings of steel,
Be a catalyst as soft as sinews of the newborn babe!
All may be well.

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