The internet seems to ignore legislation until somebody tries to take something away from us... then we carefully defend that one thing and never counter-attack. Then the other side says, "OK, compromise," and gets half of what they want. That's not the way to win... that's the way to see a steady and continuous erosion of rights online.

The solution is to start lobbying for our own laws. It's time to go on the offensive if we want to preserve what we've got. Let's force the RIAA and MPAA to use up all their political clout just protecting what they have.

If their legal arm gets out of control? This is an industry that demands payment from summer camps if the kids sing Happy Birthday or God Bless America, an industry that issues takedown notices for a 29-second home movie of a toddler dancing to Prince. Traditional American media firms are implacably opposed to any increase in citizens’ ability to create, copy, save, alter, or share media on our own. They fought against cassette audio tapes, and photocopiers. They swore the VCR would destroy Hollywood. They tried to kill Tivo. They tried to kill MiniDisc. They tried to kill player pianos. They do this whenever a technology increases user freedom over media. Every time. Every single time.

We could vote for people with the guts to run and pay for our schools properly. But we don't. We vote for people who cut a billion dollars from education, then blame the victims.

Those politicians should be ashamed of themselves.

But so should we.

[Those opposed to teaching about climate change and evolution] are making a pedagogical argument, that it is somehow good pedagogy, good critical thinking, for students to learn both. That it is somehow a good pedagogy for students to learn good science and bad science.

Piracy is not going to be solved by the heavy hand of the law. As far as businesses should be concerned, it can only ultimately be "solved" by new business models, just as radios, record players, tape recorders, and video recorders all required media companies to figure out new ways of making money. We are not about to jump in a time machine to return to the 60s and give up the internet just because some companies can't compete.

Since the rise of Napster, the media industry has been in a furor over media piracy. Not only do they get pissed when people rip and distribute media content on the internet, they throw a fit whenever teenagers make their own music videos based on their favorite song. Even though every child in America is asked to engage in remix in schools for educational purposes (“Write a 5-paragraph essay as though you were dropped into Lord of the Flies”), doing so for fun and sharing your output on the internet has been deemed criminal. Media piracy is messy, because access to content is access to social status and power in a networked era. Some people are simply “stealing” but others are actually just trying to participate in culture. It’s complicated.

Teachers look to technology as a tool for learning. Legislators see it as a way to reduce cost. It is a way to deliver more content with fewer personnel. If legislators were serious about really putting tech in education on a large-scale for learning, then they would put the money up for proper professional development and implementation.

The [SOPA] schism between content creators and platforms like Kickstarter, Tumblr and YouTube is generational. It’s people who grew up on the Web versus people who still don’t use it. In Washington, they simply don’t see the way that the Web has completely reconfigured society across classes, education and race. The Internet isn’t real to them yet.

issues of copyright law, political control, privacy, and child protection are exciting governments around the world about stepping in to regulate cyberspace. While this may solve problems in the short-term, these regulations will be blunt, hasty, and hard to undo. And they will run the risk of extinguishing the internet's connective power before we have the chance to realize it.

• Although Facebook’s minimum age is 13, parents of 13- and 14-year-olds report that, on average, their child joined Facebook at age 12.
• Half (55%) of parents of 12-year-olds report their child has a Facebook account, and most (82%) of these parents knew when their child signed up. Most (76%) also assisted their 12-year old in creating the account.
• A third (36%) of all parents surveyed reported that their child joined Facebook before the age of 13, and two-thirds of them (68%) helped their child create the account.
• Half (53%) of parents surveyed think Facebook has a minimum age and a third (35%) of these parents think that this is a recommendation and not a requirement.
• Most (78%) parents think it is acceptable for their child to violate minimum age restrictions on online services.

...

While there is merit to thinking about how to strengthen parent permission structures, focusing on this obscures the issues that COPPA is intended to address: data privacy and online safety. COPPA predates the rise of social media. Its architects never imagined a world where people would share massive quantities of data as a central part of participation. It no longer makes sense to focus on how data are collected; we must instead question how those data are used. Furthermore, while children may be an especially vulnerable population, they are not the only vulnerable population. Most adults have little sense of how their data are being stored, shared, and sold.

I’ve participated in dozens of hearings and meetings on Capitol Hill to talk about regulating “the Internet.”  There’s a bizarre and worrisome ritual at these meetings.  Elected officials begin the conversation by confessing they’ve never used the products and services they proceed to praise or condemn.  They feel obliged to act, they say, because they know their children are using them all the time.  Why do they take such pride in their ignorance?  And what are they really worried about?

The result isn’t surprising.  The last decade in particular is littered with failed efforts to “solve” problems of on-line life that regulators didn’t define or even understand in the first place.  At the federal, state, and international level, we have a body of worthless law

Why are we legislating against the medium and not the behavior(s)? Before computer-mediated communication was really possible, didn’t teachers use paper and pens/pencils to get private messages to students? Did we ever ban paper and pens/pencils? Lots of inappropriate behaviors occurred in band rooms and cars and… We don’t ban those. Aren’t there ways to draft sexual harassment policies to cover the behaviors that policymakers are concerned about without singling out social media” or the Internet or…? Shouldn’t we encourage educators to model good/positive digital citizenship instead?

The open digital environment already offers substantial advantages to scholars who are seeking greater reach and impact for their work. As the benefits of traditional publication decline because of some publishers' fearful attack on fair use, the benefits of open access will loom larger. Universities, too, are likely to discover that the status quo is unsustainable and move more quickly to adapt promotion-and-tenure processes to the new reality of direct online publication.

For the next hand, I raise you 43 Nobel Laureate scientists. That's right: 43 Nobel Laureate scientists have endorsed our effort to repeal Louisiana's creationism law. ... Congresswoman Bachmann, you claim that Nobel Laureates support creationism. Show me your hand. If you want to be taken seriously by voters while you run for President, back up your claims with facts. Can you match 43 Nobel Laureates, or do you fold?

Heck, forget whether or not you agree with his views on creationism. This kid has chutzpah! (and a talent for community mobilization to go with it)

How ‘secure’ do our homes remain if police, armed with no warrant, can pound on doors at will and, on hearing sounds indicative of things moving, forcibly enter and search for evidence of unlawful activity?

The strategies spammers use to get past our attempts to tune them out display just the sort of ingenuity we need in dealing with these FOIA requests. The Mackinac Center's fishing expedition is like fake messages from PayPal trying to get our credit-card information. To combat it, we must adopt the strategies of a different Internet predator. Instead of fighting fire with fire, we must fight phishing with spam.

Teachers at an East Harlem elementary school are bizarrely forbidden from communicating with parents without first getting a supervisor's permission and from calling parents outside of normal school hours, the teachers handbook says.

While many schools are jumping through hoops to get parents involved in their kids' education, PS 146 prohibits teachers from using their cellphones or personal e-mail accounts to discuss anything with parents of the students they oversee all day.

"All student concerns, phone calls to parents, any communication with parents/guardians and/or personnel matters require notification/approval to your direct supervisor," the rigid regulations say. "ALL communication must be made from school phones only."

Should personal information that people store online, like e-mail messages, photos and location updates, be treated the same as telephone calls or paper documents stored in a person’s home?

Right now, they often aren’t, in part because the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which governs surveillance of what people do online, was written in 1986 — well before Twitter direct messages, Facebook status updates or Foursquare check-ins.

And Web users generally do not understand when and how law enforcement can get access to their information

I think this should depend on the 'public' nature of the information. For example, a private e-mail between two people should be treated more like snail mail. But a publicly-available photo on Flickr is exactly that: public. And a location update on Foursquare may fall in between, depending on with whom it was shared (i.e., individual, small group, or the world at large).

Karen Cator, the chief of the U.S. Education Department’s office of educational technology, says that “people have very different ways of interpreting” CIPA, and Federal Communications Commission officials say the number of schools actually found in violation of the act is minute. Most violations that occur, they say, relate to the proper procedures for establishing filters, not the exposure of students to improper content.

Silsbee school officials had two responses to the [sexual assault] incident. First, they urged H.S. to keep a low profile, such as avoiding the school cafeteria and not taking part in homecoming activities. With the support of her family, she refused to do so, rejecting the notion that she had anything to be ashamed of. Secondly, school officials kicked her off the cheerleading squad for refusing to cheer for Bolton. No kidding.

Bolton had been allowed back on campus during a brief period when one grand jury withdrew the charges before another grand jury reinstated them. During a basketball game, H.S. cheered for the entire team but refused to cheer “Rakheem” during his free-throws, so she was off the squad.

H.S.’s parents sued the school for violating her right to free speech, but an appeals court dismissed her case earlier this month. The bizarre reasoning: “In her capacity as cheerleader, [she] served as a mouthpiece through which the school could disseminate speech–namely, support for its athletic teams.” Not cheering for Bolton “constituted substantial interference with the work of the school because, as a cheerleader, [she] was at the basketball game for the purpose of cheering, a position she undertook voluntarily.” In other words, the “work of the school” is basketball, and H.S. was obligated to put on a robotic smile and cheer for the man who had assaulted her.

"Only the school board has ultimate responsibility for what goes on in the classroom, legitimately giving it a say over what teachers may (or may not) teach in the classroom," the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, in Cincinnati, said in its opinion.

...

"When a teacher teaches, the school system does not regulate that speech as much as it hires that speech," Sutton wrote, borrowing language from a 7th Circuit decision in a similar case. "Expression is a teacher's stock in trade, the commodity she sells to her employer in exchange for a salary. And if it is the school board that hires that speech, it can surely regulate the content of what is or is not expressed, what is expressed in other words on its behalf."

I’m in the last day of a 3 day workshop sponsored by AERA looking at LGBTQ issues in education.

Yesterday, one of the sessions was beyond depressing. John Easton came in from the US Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences where he is the Director. A good chunk of the session was spent discussing data infrastructure needs (building large datasets). Most of this would be a snoozer for me since methodologically I’m a historian. But when Dr. Easton was pushed to include a mere few questions regarding a student’s sexual orientation and gender identity on the survey behind the database, he quickly slapped down that suggestion. Furthermore, the entire manner in which that idea was throttled was incredibly condescending. Various scholars brought up the issue of the high rate of suicide with queer youth and just getting a baseline number of “how many” would be helpful. Second, it would end arguments that, “we really don’t have any queer kids in our district or state.”

But nope. Nothing doing. You would have thought we were asking for 100,000 Joan Jett Blakk (as in drag star and political activist) public schools to be built and staffed across the US. I came away with the strong impression that Dr. Easton would prefer that the queers shut up and go away. It was a brutal, brutal session

The 14th Amendment, adopted after the Civil War, states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” It could not be clearer.

The Constitution apparently does not matter to these politicians. They also do not seem to care that Arizona is earning a national reputation for intolerance and racism

Congress should establish a simple registration requirement, not when something is created but in order to maintain the copyright. So let's say 14 years after you have published something, you need to register that. And if you don't register that, then you’re signaling to the world that you don't care about the copyright and the world can treat it as if you don't care about the copyright. But if you do register it, at least we have a clear understanding of who owns what.

The second change is we need to once again think about what the balance should be between free access to culture and metered access to culture, because both extremes are mistakes, either the extreme that says everything is free because then lots of people won't create because they can't cover their cost of creating, or the regime that says everything needs to be licensed, because in that world there’s a whole range of creativity – think of kids producing stuff on YouTube – that can't begin to happen because the cost of negotiating and clearing those rights is just so extreme.

the trade group is arguing that a password-protected space on the Web is not a classroom [and thus doesn't qualify for 'fair use' for copyright purposes].

A panel of parents, teachers and administrators will meet later this week to comb the dictionary for potentially graphic words or definitions and issue a report within a month.

"They will determine the extent to which the dictionaries support the curriculum, the age appropriateness of the materials and its suitability for the age levels of the students," Cadmus said. "It's not going to be an arbitrary decision."

The dictionaries were in the reference section of the fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms.

School board President Rita Peters supports the committee but believes the district was pressured into forming it because of one unidentified but vocal parent.

"I think it's absurd that we will remove dictionaries from our library especially because these dictionaries are the same ones we use in our spelling bees," she said. "I think we are approaching censorship with this. If they ban this book, they better clean house and go through all of them. What's good for one is good for all. I think we will open a big can of worms if these books are banned. It's the dictionary after all, c'mon."

At a CALI conference a few years ago there was a presentation by a law student (U. Cincinnati, I think) who went beyond the idea of distributing outlines of his classes on-line: he took his class notes, the readings, etc., and created his own podcasts - audio files that he distributed on-line - that consisted of his own lectures/discussions of the material covered in his classes. He was essentially creating his own on-line courses based on what he was learning in class (and he said he had 50,000+ people downloading and, presumedly, listening to these podcasts). BUT, before his first year of law school started, he met with each of his professors and told them of his plans - he wasn’t asking PERMISSION because he already had a good idea of what the law in this area was - and only one of his professors had any qualms about it, and, ultimately, there were no efforts to stop him from what he was doing and by now, I think, he probably has an entire law school education’s worth of podcasts on-line.
Having these outlines on-line just changes the scale of what our students already had available to them: the internet long ago made the exchange of all manner of information and data much easier. And, yes, this is probably why more students these days may seem to anticipate your lines of discussion and questions in class but, again, its really just a change of scale from fifteen years ago when students had to physically exchange floppy discs containing course outlines that they had written or that they had obtained from upperclassmen.

Brian Huddleston

The U.S. Department of Education wants school officials to “eyeball” students who decline to state [their race] and check a box for them, reports McClatchy [News].  In order to identify racial/ethnic achievement gaps, “the agency is pressing schools to identify all students by race in 2010-11 or face penalties.

the Pantybomber wasn’t the big joke. The real laugh was the United States government. The global hyperpower spent the next week making itself a laughingstock to the entire planet. First, the bureaucrats at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) swung into action with a whole new range of restrictions.

Against radical Yemen-trained Muslims wearing weaponized briefs? Of course not. That would be too obvious. So instead they imposed a slew of constraints against you.

Security is both a feeling and a reality. The propensity for security theater comes from the interplay between the public and its leaders.

When people are scared, they need something done that will make them feel safe, even if it doesn't truly make them safer. Politicians naturally want to do something in response to crisis, even if that something doesn't make any sense.

Often, this "something" is directly related to the details of a recent event. We confiscate liquids, screen shoes, and ban box cutters on airplanes. We tell people they can't use an airplane restroom in the last 90 minutes of an international flight. But it's not the target and tactics of the last attack that are important, but the next attack. These measures are only effective if we happen to guess what the next terrorists are planning.

If we spend billions defending our rail systems, and the terrorists bomb a shopping mall instead, we've wasted our money. If we concentrate airport security on screening shoes and confiscating liquids, and the terrorists hide explosives in their brassieres and use solids, we've wasted our money. Terrorists don't care what they blow up and it shouldn't be our goal merely to force the terrorists to make a minor change in their tactics or targets.

Our current response to terrorism is a form of "magical thinking." It relies on the idea that we can somehow make ourselves safer by protecting against what the terrorists happened to do last time.