For any document, or any device of any kind, it will be used when and if it is useful. If the value of a school or district’s Acceptable Use Policy comes from its being read, adopted, and practiced, then elements to the document must be designed to be useful to its audience. It must help us do our jobs.

At its most basic level, an AUP is designed to protect. It prevents users of the institution’s information and communication technologies (ICT) from engaging dangerous, abusive, or unethical practices. An AUP also helps protects the administrators of the ICT facilities and the institutions, as a whole, from liability.

However, to be useful, an Acceptable Use Policy should not become a wall, preventing access to resources. Instead, it should be a guide through the maze of today’s evolving information landscape.

Perhaps one way of providing for the protections, which require clearly itemized limitations and a certain amount of legalize, and the more user-valued guidelines, is to embrace the three dimensional nature of today’s info-environment, creating a multi-layered Acceptable Use Document. The following layering scheme and descriptions are intended as a starting place. Much conversation and adapting will take place as readers share their perspectives and information needs.

This layer constitutes the board-approved AUP document that many or most education institutions have in place. It usually includes includes elements similar to those defined in The School ICT Policy by NAACE.

• Introduction
• Significance of Information & Communication Technology
• School’s Aims for ICT
• Access to ICT
• Inclusion
• Monitoring and Review
• Copyright and Licensing ¹

This layer of the institution’s AUP would include the required legal language and would call for approval of the school board or other appropriate governance body. This document would also be written with a certain amount of foresight, as any alterations would require further approval events. Three years may be the longest that such a document could go un-reviewed adapted and re-approved.

There may be elements of ICT use policies that simply require more regular or ongoing review to continue to reflect the institution’s advancing information infrastructure and the educational needs of its stakeholders. These polices might be included in a second layer to the AUP hyper-document, that can be reviewed and altered with the approval of a designated school or district official. Such reviews might be required with the adoption of a new Internet application, an exciting and potentially powerful practices learned about at a conference, or new techniques for overcoming current protection technologies.

The networked, digital, and overwhelming information environment that AUPs address remain mysterious to many students and teachers. It is the evolving nature of the landscape that requires us all to adopt a lifestyle of learning, so that we can continue to harness its potentials. For this reason, support materials should be layered beneath (so to speak) the institution’s policy documents. This layer should serve 4 functions:

1. Educate the institution’s stakeholders about the emerging and evolving information landscape, its potentials and the tools that enable use to harness them.
2. To promote established best-practice applications of the information landscape and promising experimental applications.
3. Support and promote the institution’s policies for the acceptable use of its information infrastructure.

The third function could be accomplished by organizing the support documents around the policies, where the structure of the document would draw attention to the aims and prohibitions established by the policy. This layer would also liberally link back to the policy document, frequently aligning support materials to the overall goals and mission of the schools and district.

This layer of the institution’s AUP would also leverage many of the capabilities of today’s information landscape. This layer could easily be a wiki, inviting ongoing revision and growth of these resources by professional staff, community, and even learners, where appropriate. This support layer would also include a variety of media: text, images, sound, video, and animation drawing in existing resources from other community documents.

In the continuing efforts to tie the use of ICT to the institution’s aims, a layer of learning objects that are also structured around and explicitly linked to the policy layers. These might include lesson plans, self-directed lessons, interactive content, assessment, and more.

This layer, like the one before, will be highly dynamic -- a garden to be cultivated and grown. Professional staff will be able to add to and adapt existing objects, and even draw in resources from other archives, tied, again, to the aims of the school or district. This will, by far, be the most active and dynamic layer, a shopping mall, so to speak, that aligns the mission desires of stakeholders to the policies of the institution.