Category: Mass Communication Law

Trusting Kill Switches and Manners

Wired warns us about the future, kill switches, and Digital Manners Policies arguing, “Once we go down this path — giving one device authority over other devices — the security problems start piling up.”

I tend to agree. When the person behind the wheel loses complete control they are put in a position where someone else might abuse these new controls. As a tinker-er I’d also feel any managed devices I owned had been crippled.

However, the security problem I also worry about is the potential for a false sense of security. It may sound convenient to have phones muted in theatres, but there are contexts where this could be dangerous (a doctor might not realize the restriction and miss an important call). Certainly someone will think that, since OnStar can turn off their car if it were stolen, they can leave the doors unlocked and the keys on the dash.

Trusting technology is fine–but there might come a point where this trust could make us less aware of our surroundings.

Professor: Web 2.0 an awkward fit for the academic world

Martin Weller wrote a piece for On the Horizon about a challenge higher education is facing:

When learners have been accustomed to very facilitative, usable, personalisable and adaptive tools both for learning and socialising, why will they accept standardised, unintuitive, clumsy and out of date tools in formal education they are paying for?

A good question–and one that applies to instructors as well! Ars did a great write-up, and you’ll find a summary written by the author over at Michael Feldstein’s blog (he was the editor of the journal issue). Weller is a good writer, and makes his point much better than I could:

The monolithic LMSs will be deserted, digital tumbleweed blowing down their forums. Students [and instructors] will abandon these in favour of their tools, the back channel will grow and it will be constituted from content and communication technologies that don’t require a training course to understand and that come with a ready made community.

This may seem like just a technological issue, but it runs deeper than this. If we add to the technological experience, the user participation one they will have had through social tools such as Flickr, YouTube, blogging, wikis, etc and compare this with the top-down, pre-filtered experience they have in courses and selected resources, it becomes obvious that this is about more than just technology, it is a social change.

I can think of two possible reasons behind this phenomenon.

The first is momentum. A university that runs an e-mail service, a web hosting service, a streaming video service, etc. sees all of these tools and wonders where to start and where to find the time and resources. Should they let something go, or try to do everything for everybody?

Second, FERPA has everybody scared. The purpose of the law was to protect student’s personal and grade information from things like the grade list on the door and prying parents. Yet fear over having students work on external commercial systems, which are largely secure from hacking and violate privacy only on the aggregate level of data, causes hesitation from using Web 2.0 systems or attempting to form partnerships with their owners.

I’m curious if anyone has written a recent history of educational technology. What did universities do when e-mail was the new thing? My guess is that they just bought a VAX system. If that “buy an X system” model is breaking down, how can institutions affordably buy or build an open platform that has the flexibility to work with existing apps, develop new programs, and protect user security–all at once?

Indefinite Imprisonment For Web Site Content

A New Zealand man, who ignored a gag order last year ordering that his website be taken down, is facing the possibility of Indefinite Imprisonment until he follows the court’s order. A look at more of the facts, as well as the website in question makes it pretty clear that this could never happen in America–his speech is clearly political and thus receives the highest protection (sounds like Near v. Minnesota to me). I’m no expert, but there’s even a “freedom of expression” clause in the New Zealand Constitution. It’s amazing this could happen in a “parliamentary representative democratic monarchy.”