It's Policy Central

 

(Image Source: ShooFlyDontBotherMe on Imgur) 

[Charlie Kelly from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode "King of the Rats" S.6 ep10] 

Network and technology use policy is a necessity in this day and age when most of our learning and communicating is done electronically. These structures were not in place a mere 15 or so years ago in schools but have had to review these policies with my child each year upon their return to their school. The educational system has learned a lot from previous generations, and the school-provided laptops do not allow them to do much outside the scope of their schoolwork.  I know that children are clever and can circumnavigate whatever obstacles they may encounter. That's what my friends and I did at their age! 

Higher education tends to be more lenient when it comes to these policies. Including staff, faculty, and students in their policies, universities set general guidelines, that aren't as restricting.

 University of California, Irvine is one of 10 campuses in the UC System. As such, many policies encompass all of these systems. The Computer and Network Use Policy for UCI covers what type of behavior is expected of their users. This document provides an overall expectation of users and gives examples of misuse of the network privileges the institution provides.  It is extremely different from policies seen in other primary or secondary education. The policy from the school district of Manawa, features guidelines written in a digestible way for younger students, as statements so that they can agree with the terms. The UCI policy, instead is much more similar to that of Boston Public School's policy. While students are expected to agree to these terms, guardians and students aren't required to sign the documents. 

Most of the younger educational institutions update their policy, from what I understand, annually. Especially with new emerging technologies, such as AI - which is a big topic currently in the library world - it is crucial to keep these languages up to date. Unfortunately for UCI, the policy was last revised in 2011! It has been 13 years - social media alone has changed so significantly, and the lack of verbiage about AI specifically, is a point of concern. Most of the language used can be applicable throughout the ages of technological advances, so it would be good to review, revise, and edit these policies on a more consistent timeline. The Information Technology department is primarily in charge of creating these documents, but I imagine involving other staff, such as librarians could be incredibly helpful. 

Luckily for the staff here, we receive extensive online safety courses annually (though it does feel like it's almost every other month - these trainings can take all day sometimes). The courses cover topics such as phishing, malware social engineering, and others. Due to this, I have not encountered breaches of safety or privacy at our institution often.Which is great for the community!