Cnet news.com and Rollcall.com (from summary in FreePress.net) report that Senator Stevens is pushing hard to the get the support he needs to get a rapid vote before the August 7 – September 4 recess – So, it may be time to say, SPEAK NOW OR FOREVER HOLD YOUR PEACE! Here is how things currently…
Wow. I grabbed some sleep last night and woke to see this inspiring piece from Steven Downes. Seems the online learning world has once again rallied (gosh, net neutrality, then DOPA and now the Blackboard patent) and is quickly getting its collective ducks in a row pulling together a historical "prior art" record (see links…
With DOPA and net neutrality taking up so much space, I was almost going to let this story pass. I mean, Blackboard couldn't really try to enforce a patent related to such a nebulous concept as technology relating to systems and methods involved in offering online education, could they? Well, they did – as seen…
The latest FCC report on U.S. High Speed Internet Access was released on July 26th. The report notes that high speed connections to the Internet increased by 33% in 2005 to 50.2 million total high speed lines. Just over 85% of the high speed lines were serving residential end users. For the first time, the…
The sponsors of Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) – House Bill HR 5319 cite a seemingly staggering statistic. Quoted directly in Findings section of the Act is the statistic from the United States Attorney General that "One in five children has been approached sexually on the Internet." It is right there in black and white…
Ok. How about we pretend for the moment that there is no threat to open Internet access or to social networking learning opportunities in public schools . . . why? Because there is a really cool social networking initiative that deserves our attention over at OpenAcademic.org. The OpenAcademic project launch was announced today with the…
My husband commented to me last night that I am sounding a little "angry" in my posts of late. Looking over the past month, I haven't contemplated many "ed tech" or "online learning" discoveries. Instead, I have been more than a little preoccupied with the threat that I see to the infrastructure that supports online…
Between the U.S. House defeat of COPE Net Neutrality provisions and their recent 410 – 15 passage of DOPA, I am really beginning to question my online learning aspirations. Is it as dire as some predict? Are we headed straight for the Internet Dark Ages? I didn't fully grasp the twisted mindset on the DOPA…
Not only are there now two subscribers to my blog listed in Bloglines (along with my own subscription – set up when I was my ONLY subscriber), but I got a couple of shout outs from Jeff Lebow at Edtechtalk.com and Worldbridges.net. The first came during EdTechTalk #50 and the other one in my "voicemail"…
My mom showed be a ginormous full page ad in the back of her local paper saying, "The cable company is making big bucks by keeping you from having a real choice." Assuming that this was somehow related to the Net Neutrality debate, we checked out the slick web site and read several pages that…