The recruiter made use of your digital traces. Nearly everyone leaves these traces on the Internet. They can be articles in on-line school newspapers, your presentation on social networks like Facebook, comments you made on blogs and so on. Often you have no influence on those traces: they are stored in big computer networks and cannot be changed anymore.

So at an early age, students have to learn that what they publish about themselves can be seen all over the world for a very long period. They also have to learn about the possibilities to protect themselves and about the many choices that they can make.

Connected to this is open education. Last year, in September, a group of people came together in Cap Town and they wrote a declaration to promote open education. This declaration got the name "the Cape Town Open Education declaration".

 Everyone involved in education is invited to sign this declaration which can be found on the Internet: at http://www.capetowndeclaration.org

This declaration describes three strategies for promoting open education: involvement of educators and learners, open educational resources and open educational policies.

Here we are interested in how the website of a school can be used in these strategies. This will be explored in the next months.

Secondary schools have mixed feelings about the big, popular social networking sites. Many schools and public libraries in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia have restricted access to MySpace because it has become "such a haven for student gossip and malicious comments." (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace).

Secondary schools can provide an alternative by giving the students the opportunity to present themselves and their work on the website of the school.

There are several ways by which potential visitors can be guided towards the site. The first is of course to try to get a high ranking with the search engines like Google and Yahoo. Another way is to get listed by directories or that other sites have links to the site of the school.

The ranking of search engines has become a real science. The outcome so far is that the best way to get a high ranking is to have an interesting, attractive and up to date site. The words or the combination of wordt should no be too general or too special. For instance the word Mackay itself is too general, it gives more than 10.000.000 hits. The words Mackay College give far less hits and, already for more than a year, Mackay College in Nateete is one the first place in this list.

Many kind of threats make it necessary to invest a lot in security measures. For instance a firewall is needed to protect the inside (the LAN: the local area network) from the outside. Installing and maintaining a firewall is expensive.

To have the advantages of having access to the Internet without all those disadvantages, a so called "Internet in a box" seems a good solution. This solution consists of several staps:

1. select the information that is of interest to the educational institutions

2. ask the providers of this information for the necessary rights to copy and distribute it

3. collect the information in a central place

4. distribute the information to the educational institutions

5. update the information regularly

This means a lot of organization. The eGranary Digital Library is such an Internet in a box. It is realized by the WiderNet project. For more details see http://www.widernet.org

Thanks to TEEA Mackay College has an eGranay Digital Library.

These wishes and requirements have to be realised with the available means. There are basic means like disk space, data transfer capacity, programming language, database system, email and blogs. And there are the design and programming resources needed to realise the web site based upon these basic means.

At this moment the basic means for the web site of Mackay College are provided by the Small Business scheme of Yahoo.

Compare the information

In the request some details are mentioned. You can compare these details with the information on the website. For instance the student can say that he/she studies for nurse. From the information on the website it becomes clear that it is not possible to study for nurse at Mackay College, so you know that you have to discard this request.

Well-known cases of false pretext

On the website of Mackay College the well-known cases of false pretext will be published.

Where to find more information

On the website there are e-mail addresses where more information can be obtained. 

These are general rules. How to implement those rules is sometimes not easy. So many things happen at a school: exams, excursions, parties, projects. And it is so easy to take pictures and publish them together with names, e-mail addresses and other personal details. For instance it is not good to publish worldwide the marks of each student. But this weekend, newspapers like the New Vision and The Monitor published articles about the 2006 O'level results with the marks, the names and personal stories of the best students. So it seems there is another rule: good news can be published in more detail than not so good news.

The article describes several key elements from the speech the Minister of Education and Sports, Mrs. Bitamazire, held at the opening of the second annual education exhibition at Lugogo yard.

In her speech she warned private schools who run deceptive advertisements via their website to stop. She revealed that the ministry plans to grade private schools based on the facilities they have and to monitor their adverts. 

There are some general requirements for the website:

- it has to be attractive

- it has to be accurate

- it has to be up-to-date