"The most deadly misconception about American youth has been the sexual predator panic,” [boyd] said. “The model we have of the online sexual predator is this lurking man who reaches out on the Internet and grabs a kid. And there is no data that support that. The vast majority of sex crimes against kids involve someone that kid trusts, and it’s overwhelmingly family members."

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.

Understanding is based not simply on what is present, but also on how the spaces between what is given are seen, named, unnamed, ignored.  All are important.   The five statements that Iowa Commissioner Jason Glass is quoted as saying are overpopulated with intention and as such are more gate, than solid door.

To situate this as otherwise will not serve us (or children) well.  I tend to agree with Scott that the devil is in the detail and want to suggest it is a devil we need to know. Nonetheless, we are deep in pretense.  It makes me wonder why we continue to only privilege what is situated as obvious.  We need to look at the spaces not named.  For example, what would happen if we substituted school or school district for educator/teaching in Mr. Glass's five statements?  What would be the difference if we believed that the relative health of a system was critical as opposed to only measuring the relative "effectiveness" of each teacher? Would this dual view make a difference?

This'll keep me thinking for quite a while...

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.

If you doubt that politics in Congress has become more partisan, consider this: For the first time ever, in the 111th Congress that convened during the first two years of the Obama presidency, the National Journal's vote ratings showed that the most conservative Democratic senator was to the left of the most liberal Republican. There is now no overlap ideologically at all between the parties. Only nine of the remaining small number of conservative House Democrats (now called "Blue Dogs") were to the right of the most liberal House Republican. That Republican, Mike Castle of Delaware, was dumped by his party in a primary as he ran for the Senate and is now out of Congress, as are the bulk of the Blue Dogs.

That brings us to the 112th Congress. House Republicans are adamant about refusing to compromise with the president, and are able in most instances to make good on the threat. When they are not able to maintain this unity, they are simply unwilling to bring up or pass measures that would lose significant GOP votes and require as many or more Democrats in support. This is a formula for gridlock, or worse. is the Republicans are simply declining to govern.

• 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

Economist Doug Henwood points out that it would be quite easy to make higher education completely free. In the U.S., it accounts for less than 2 percent of gross domestic product. The personal share of about 1 percent of gross domestic product is a third of the income of the richest 10,000 households. That's the same as three months of Pentagon spending. It's less than four months of wasted administrative costs of the privatized healthcare system, which is an international scandal.

It's about twice the per capita cost of comparable countries, has some of the worst outcomes, and in fact it's the basis for the famous deficit. If the U.S. had the same kind of healthcare system as other industrial countries, not only would there be no deficit, but there would be a surplus.

times are tough and the critics are quick to jump to the fact that science, too, must be downsized.

But science is different. Science is the Engine of Prosperity.

Downsizing science is like eating your own seed corn. Politicians spend all their time arguing how to cut up the pie and devising all kinds of different ways to slice it up. My Attitude is: We Need a Bigger Pie. And a bigger pie, comes from science, the engine of prosperity. So, by slowly losing the edge in different areas, the US is making it difficult to generate the new technologies which will give us a bigger pie.

A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.

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?

I have no doubt that the top 10% of teachers are so skilled at their craft that they are producing achievement gains despite dwindling resources, increasing class sizes, and no mentoring support. The others may deserve to be subject to a watchful eye or even dismissed, but this is not reform so much as yelling the old rules more loudly. Reformers need to get their argument straight: Is the system broken and therefore needs a radical change, or does the system work just fine as it is so long as you add more enforcement?

Yes, ultimately, innovation and quality control will both be part of the solution, but blaming teachers for the problem only makes sense if the system has given them every possible opportunity to succeed. A recent New York Times op-ed piece made this point well when they compared teachers to soldiers, explaining that when military endeavors fail "we don't say 'it's these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefit plans!'" but rather we look to bigger-picture infrastructure and higher-up leadership for the reasons for failure. We also don't say that the success of some soldiers proves that that the unsuccessful ones are at fault. We also don't create unnecessary competition among soldiers, leading them to withhold their good ideas from their platoon.

We don't say or do any of these things because, as techniques for creating positive change, they are not only mythical, they are absurd, ineffective, and immoral.

What exactly do you have in mind, pedagogically speaking, beyond bullying teachers and kids to get higher scores on bad tests?

It's safe to say that most K-12 schools are not naturally inclined to try new approaches without clear evidence that those approaches are likely to work. That cautious nature is not necessarily a bad thing because embracing change simply for the sake of change is misguided and will undoubtedly steer schools off a productive course.

But that raises an important question: How do schools innovate to improve themselves when innovation, by its very nature, usually happens before evidence of effectiveness is available?

people like [Indiana State Superintendent Tony] Bennett, who promote test-based “accountability” and other punitive reform strategies, are actually advocating for the status quo, since that is and has been the existing state of affairs for quite some time.

By contrast, we who embrace ideas like equitable funding and local control of curriculum are pursuing a state of affairs which, in many places, hasn’t existed for years (if ever!).

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 most recent statements supported by Secretary Duncan tell us that a teacher with Master’s degree has little effect on students’ learning. Following this line of reasoning through, it would seem that the government would want our teachers to begin and end with a bachelor’s degree.