Last night I sat on a panel with Dave Bill and Kerri Richardson Redding talking about how we use Creative Commons licenses in our school with students and adults. The event was the Creative Commons Salon NYC, and the theme was "Opening Education." The night started out with Eric Frank of Flat World Knowledge and Neeru Paharia of Peer 2 Peer University. Eric talked about how Flat World was publishing digital textbooks under Creative Commons licenses (non commercial) and had some interesting insight in what seems to be an awful industry in general. Neeru talked about the motivations for being part of an organization that believes that anyone should be able to take college-level classes online, for free.

Dave, Kerri, and I seemed to focus much more on why Creative Commons was important to students in particular whether giving them methods for publishing their own work, joining into something bigger (the commons), or using material from the Internet that wasn't entangled in potential legal folly.

I definitely have some more reflection to do on the event before I can blog more, but thought I should fire out the photos and the summaries. I had a great time with our NYCIST colleagues who were there, too. Thanks for the support!

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People/companies can develop so much great stuff on the Internet because of one major feature of the ‘Net, called the end to end principle. All this means is that the Internet connects two ends together. It is nothing more than a pipe that sends information back and forth. It is the machines on the end that have all the brains (computers, routers, etc). The network itself is brainless. This is great, it means innovators can send whatever they want through the pipes, and a long as your computer can accept it, it works.

If you have Skype on your computer, you and I can have a free voice conversation or even video conference. If you have a web browser like Firefox, you can connect to a website like the one you are looking at now. There is nothing between you and me that can block our our communication – again, the network knows nothing more than passing information.

Some savvy legislators are trying to pass laws that protect this end to end principle. However, there is one major group who is objecting. Can you guess who that might be? Well, the Internet Service Providers of course. They are arguing that they should be able to control your bandwith. They want to decide what data going through the pipes is important and what is not. So, when a company like Vonage lets you make unlimited phone calls on the cheap using the Internet, Verizon might decide to make Vonage’s traffic slow way down, to a point where it is unusable. Why? Because it competes with their phone lines and their voice over IP offerings.

We as educators, as technologists or just as Internet users cannot allow this to happen. Please consider joining MoveOn.org’s campaign to protect Internet Neutrality (as it has been dubbed). Spread the word, and let people know that the power of the Internet is worth protecting. We cannot allow corporations to decide for us how the Internet will be used. If you don’t want to join MoveOn, please contact your representative directly.

If you want to learn more about what could happen to the world if this is not protected, read the amazing Lawrence Lessig

Technorati Tags: change, Congress, end to end principle, future, Internet, law, legal, Network Neutrality, network

I have recently been engaged in many discussions on plagiarism. We have been trying to create a curriculum on academic dishonesty across all grade levels. We want students to be able to distinguish when they cite vs. when they don’t. We want students to know when they can ask a classmate for help and when they have gone too far. We want students to understand that taking material or giving material without citations are both problematic.

These are all terribly difficult topics to clearly convey to students. Now, add the rub. I was in a department meeting with teachers discussing how to set up an effective foreign language multimedia lab. The teachers felt strongly that all the DVD and VHS content they had should be digitized and be available in streaming form to students. Fantastic, who wouldn’t agree? Well, me for one. I asked the teachers to go out to the publishers and ask for digital content. We cannot break DMCA and rip DVD’s to our servers. We have to license content, just like we buy a textbook for every student rather than making photocopies. This didn’t go over too well, and was not totally understood. Teachers saw the hurdle as technical, where the real hurdle for me is ethical/legal. If we don’t want students to download pirated music, we can’t show them pirated science experiment films.

Fair Use, the most overused and misunderstood words in this topic area. Librarians are the key in the discussion. Yes, we can tape shows from PBS under conditions X, Y, Z. Yes, we can photocopy a chapter, but not the entire book, and not for every year, but for some years. Ok, there are difficult rules to examine, but those discussions are healthy and powerful. Students can engage in similar discussions exploring ethical use of media.

My favorite example: a teacher had a fake Coco Chanel handbag and was somewhat defending the purchase. My comment: how will a student understand that it is ok for a teacher to buy a pirated bag, but not ok for a student to download a pirated song?

Social networking sites have sent schools around the country into a tizzy. People have been shocked to see the type of material being posted by students.

In response, many schools with well-thought-out policies on filtering, have started to block many of the sites in question. For some this is a liabilty decision, for others, school is a place for school-designated use of the web, and not much else.

Deeper look: filtering itself creates a new set of challenges. Students are drawn to these websites for reasons many adults can’t understand. Removing access to the sites becomes a small technical hurdle for many students. Their answer, using a web proxy to outsmart the filter, and they are back on their favorite social website. This is a battle that network technologists can’t win. They block more sites, and students find more workarounds; then it begins again.

I call this The Arms Race

Suddenly, the relationship between technologists and students has shifted from collaborative to combative. And in an education context, this is a huge hurdle.

We want students to come with us when they are concerned about online issues, not worried about hiding from us. Yes, of course we think it is a bad idea to post pictures of yourself in your underwear. Yes, it is an awful idea for a 14 year old to post information about where s/he lives. And yes, we still want to know why they do it and how we can all come to an agreement on what would be a more constructive use of these sites.

p.s. a colleague of mine first used the words “the arms race,” but I am trying to expand the context for it

I saw John Palfrey [his blog], Executive Director of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society speak today at the New York Association of Independent Schools (NYSAIS) Conference for IT Managers today. What a tremendous speaker, and I couldn’t be more envious of his job – basically to think about all the amazing new technologies and how they are impacting the world. Cool, right?

Microsoft has a iPhoto-like product out called Photo Story 3. It is free to download, but Microsoft makes you jump through a few hoops first—you must go through their innocuous-sounding Genuine Advantage program first. This is so they can certify that you are not running a pirated version of Microsoft Windows. You may also have to “activate” Windows XP.

Wow, giving away good, free software is great. But it seems to be that Microsoft is more interested in catching pirates then spreading good software. A lesson from Apple would go a long way here. Make good, free software, give it to us, and create loyalty. Don’t try to bait thieves with your product; figure out another way to catch the thieves. As long as you keep them connected, the missions of the software-developers will always be cloudy. Are they trying to make the best product, or make the best bait?