When the society was closed in March, we were thrown into an unknown territory. Places of work and restaurants were bombing doors. Walking down Oslo’s street remembered me moving in a future dystopian scenery. The alive city was almost left overnight and a strange silence come down.
Somewhere the silence did not exactly came down, it was in my family appartement.
Like a two children father, I was one of the many who were recruited with urgency for the work of home school teacher, tour guide and pacemaker, in a position which I was used to till when the weekend comes. When the school and the kindergarten opened again, with following champagne showers and stormy cheers, what was left in me were only contradictory experiences.
By the introduction of the new privacy legislation, different Norwegian Municipalities have been hard affected cause their inability of personal data protection of their children in schools.
The Norwegian Data Protection Authority has issued different infringement costs, but at the same time has underlined that it is maybe too difficult, complex and important for every other single municipality to project and be responsible for its own strategies and systems. Just before the lockdown, we assisted to a true and real movement in the direction of a national strategy in order to give to Norwegian children the personal data protection they need.
Inside the house, appartement, days were spent chaotically with two parents in a temporary office and two children separated by the regularry routine. Every day one of us sat with the first class in order to track lines between words, evocate Ms on a new line and create new friends. My admiration and respect for teachers who have supported us in this processing, they could not be greater.
Every day was in act a new daily program which guides us in a pedagogic way during the day.
Each student in my daughter’s school had their iPad. It regularly ticked in school management messages that contained words and phrases that made it cool on the shoulders of cybersecurity experts. “We use digital solutions that we are not trained to use”. “We are using a new channel for video cooperation”. “It will be a rapid learning curve”.
The lockdown, happened with a few days notice, forced Norwegian schools to use many different instruments without doing necessary and in-depth privacy security impact assessment.
The guidance service data shows that many of the requests we received from the school sector came from the front line, that is, from the teachers themselves. That’s not a good sign.
The greatest error that we can do now is thinking that the coronavirus impact on school’s digitization work in Norwegian municipalities was a blessing under false pretences.
On the other side, we must keep the idea that there is much work before that Norwegian child privacy is sufficiently cured. This means that the responsibles of decisions in different ministries, directions and federations need to take seriously the intention to asset a national strategy for this work and fill the gaps that have led to privacy scandals. Like for other things, this work has been suspended when the pandemic period reached Norway. It must not be confused with the idea that the task has been resolved.
Next week my daughter will come back to school and I ask the high authority to give another round of home school. I am deeply impressed by the way in which my daughter’s teacher has accepted the home school challenge and I hope to say the same thing for the next period of the decision-makers at the top of the system.