Tag: sopa

141/365 Every Classroom is the Place for Discussing Net Neutrality

For most folks in the U.S., the closest they’ve come to thinking about Net Neutrality was last year’s brief yet loud protest against SOPA and PIPA.

This is a shame.

As a classroom teacher in two 1:1 laptop schools, Net Neutrality has been a key issue in my thinking about how anyone in a learning environment accesses information. When my students log on with devices at home, I want them to have a free and open web to provide them with the tools and information they need.

Any threat to neutrality threatens their ability to do just that.

The topic is in the courts again with the FCC’s regulations of the neutrality at issue.

If you’re boggled by the term, here’s an easy answer to the most basic of questions.

For a more detailed conversation, the folks over at Public Knowledge have put together this series of blog posts to flesh it out just a bit.

And today, they sent out this timeline of net neutrality. Any classroom discussing free speech, any classroom discussing technology, any classroom hoping to help students understand the world in which they live has a responsibility for including this conversation in their room.

We are surrounded by information and have come to rely on the open access to that information in our daily lives. The loss of net neutrality means we lose our ability to independently filter and compile the information we use to navigate the world.

For folks who want to read an accessible, nuanced explanation of the issue centered around the rise of Comcast, I highly recommend Susan Crawford’s Captive Audience.

What if we built syllabi like this?

The community over at reddit got a little steamed (understandably) in the wake of SOPA and PIPA.

Not being keen on waiting for the next wave of censorship-inspiring legislation, they decided to write the the bill that was more representative of the people. They wrote are writing it together, online, collaboratively. The first version of the bill was an open google doc where any visitor had editing privileges. Now in v2, the doc is restricted to commenting. (I assume this is to get the doc to a submittable place.)

Even if you don’t have time to read the entire bill, the comments on the definitions section, alone, help show how such a shift in the drafting mindset can inspire greater creation.

I’m starting to think about how scholarship and literature could benefit from this process. What if novelists started using this approach and then took the work offline after the commenting period. Would the increased public “ownership” drive sales?

What if a city council decided to put every matter to their constituents for open comment?

What if, on the first day of class, teachers shared a google doc with their students and said, “Let’s write our expectations for this space?” What if every assignment had a student review period before it was launched?

Interesting.