Super-speed Internet satellite blasts off in Japan - CNN.com

Super-speed Internet satellite blasts off in Japan - CNN.com Thanks to Dave Cormier who Twittered this a couple minutes ago.

Wiring the world is a pipe dream. If we are ever going to really deliver global broadband, we have to take to the sky. Thankfully, the Japanese see a future in this. Everybody just complains how terrible satellite Internet is, but that is the nature of technology. It will suck until someone can make it better. Even the speeds promised here won't be terrific in a few years, but that is why scientists get grants. Go do some science and figure out how to do it better.

As long as we leave Sprint and Verizon up to promoting technology, we'll continue to stay in the Internet dark ages. Companies look for ways to make money, not how to prove new technologies (they let other countries do that and then implement, leaving us years behind). That's why we need cooperation and support from the government (don't talk to me about subsidies for laying line). This type of cooperation keeps bleeding edge bleeding. The only thing bleeding at American communication companies is our American pride.

Dan

How to access blocked web sites

Sclipo: How to access blocked web sites

How could I not post this link?

Just the other day one of the listservs that I follow had a posting from someone cheering how she had found a previously unknown proxy site for MySpace and that it was going to be blocked now. I just love the ignorance of these people. Yeah! I found the one proxy site that students use to access these evil sites....

Well, as this video shows, there there many, many ways to do this. This is a proxy cold war and the schools are going to loose. For the same reason that the drug war will never be won and media companies will never be able to use encryption to protect their content, if people want something enough, they will find a way to get it.

Stop spending your time blocking sites and start teaching students how best to use what's out there.



Dan

Young warned over social websites

Young warned over social websites

These articles drive me crazy sometimes. A really valuable message is couched in fear of online social networks.

These same problems exist in every electronic medium. There is a persistent record. We will very likely see old Facebook videos used as evidence against Presidential candidates 10 or 20 years down the road, but we are more likely to see something pulled out of the Internet Archive well before that happens, since that is where the evidence exists on the pre-Facebook/MySpace crowd.

To say that this is a problem with online social networks is just ignorant. This is a problem with ALL form of publication (the Web is just a big publication machine).

We need to educate learners (of all ages) on how present ourselves online. We teach our children how to say please and thank you. We teach our children not to talk to strangers. We even teach our students not to run around naked outside. How about teaching children to respect others in online interactions, not to give out identifying information to strangers, and no to post potentially embarrassing materials online!

This is obviously not common knowledge and the blocking of these sites just removes the possibility of addressing these issues in schools.

Dan

Walled Gardens are dead!

I got a little carried away in my presentation on Saturday at the KAMALL/KSET conference. At one point, I declared, "Walled Gardens are dead!" While I really do believe this, I should know better than to say it that way. Luckily, nobody called me on it during the presentation, though someone did afterwards.

The reason that I shouldn't have said it like that is that it's impossible to defend and it's not true. There will always be walled gardens. Organizations will always have some sort of closed system for the sake of security, either of the data or of the participants. It's a wild world out there and I can see the need to keep student data in a closed system because it really can be used for nasty purposes.

However, this doesn't mean that the concept isn't dying. There are surely benefits for users with technologies (or services) can play nicely together. More and more, people are providing their content to the world. Whether this be videos, pictures, or ideas, users expect to be able to share this content with the world and set restrictions themselves (not the organizations/services).

I might be an idealist, but I think that ideas should be free (as in free beer AND as in freely expressed). We have both a right to benefit from the sharing of information (instructional or other) and the responsibility to share information that we possess.

Many teachers are walking the walk. They are putting their ideas in terms of lectures, activities, lesson plans, and so forth out there for public consumption. This can only benefit other teachers (and learners) who can incorporate these ideas and products in to their instruction. In this way, the sharing of ideas has moved (or is moving) from the break rooms to the ether Net. These ideas are them being collected from the ether, organized, and re-shared with others. This is where services/technologies like blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, and others come in. They enable anyone to collect, organize, and re-distribute these ideas (content) in any way they see fit. We then develop connections with these re-mixers of ideas, which forms our personal (learning) networks.

There will come a point when the walled gardens simply can't compete. They will be (or already are) relegated to spaces with a minor impact on learning/working/playing and will be seen as just another place that users have to remember to go to get the occasional message or tidbit of institutional treasures (information that can't be shared).

Call me deluded, call me a dreamer, but please call me :) Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Dan