The Senate Commerce Committee moves on with a proposal that would offer providers new opportunities without the assurance of net neutrality (eSchool News source).
The attempt to assure net neutrality was an attempt to address the following issue (quote from linked article):
Supporters of the amendment argued that service providers could give preferential treatment to business partners or use pricing and access limits to discriminate between web sites and other internet users. Phone companies have talked about creating a “two-tiered” system in which users of their networks–including schools and other web site operators–desiring faster service for the delivery of broadband or voice-over-IP applications would have to pay more. Those who couldn’t pay would be relegated to the internet “slow lane.”
The neutrality issue is not about setting a price point for connection, it is about providers ability to alter download speed of categories of data in support of provider self interest. For example, a telephone company may degrate VOIP speeds to encourage traditional phone use. A cable company might degrade video downloads to encourage pay per view or the purchase of additional channels. The provider would not be “neutral” with respect to the content one could effectively download from the Internet. The potential problem would seem to be most dangerous in locations where real competition does not exist (perhaps less populated areas without alternative providers) and users could not switch to a different provider offering more competitive services.
Technology is not perfect and sooner or later when working with technology one will face obstacles that must be overcome. I think I have noticed something about the approach people take in attempting to solve such problems. When working in a new or unmastered area, people first assume that they must be doing something wrong when they encounter problems. Sometimes this lack of creative thinking makes solving the problem impossible.
I encountered one such problem today. I operate a wiki on one of my servers for students in my summer graduate class. My tech skills are developed out of necessity and I always feel like I am operating right at the edge of my capabilities. Not a very confident feeling.
An interesting theoretical position taken by some who design wiki software (in my opinion) is that the forces of good will always overcome the forces of evil. In other words, one can allow all comers to post and edit each others posts and the final product will improve rather than disintegrate. I am not as confident and so I want to impose some access limits on the wiki I operate for my students. The system that mediawiki (the software I use) has available for addressing such issues combines login and email authentication. As system administrator, I can decide to allow a person access to the wiki and I provide that person access by using the wiki to send that person an email with a randomly generated password. If the person is who he/she claims to be (the email address belongs to the person), the person will receive the email and then use the password provided to login to the wiki (and then create a personalized password). Anyway, the system is about providing a reasonable amount of security.
This system was working until last night. A student emailed me and said she forgot her password and needed to create a new account (passwords are encrypted so creating a new account is one solution). I connected to the wiki program as administrator and had the system send her a password. She contacted me today and said the email never arrived. My first reaction was that she must have made a mistake (the wiki said it send the email). After trying a couple of more times without any luck, I began to try my standard debug strategies for such situations. I attempted to enroll myself as a student user and have the system send an email to an account I know works – my own. Still nothing. This is the point at which doubt takes over. Some mysterious config or preference file in Apache, MySQL, or MediaWiki (or some combination) must have gone bad. I had no idea where to begin looking or what I would do about the wiki requirement I had established for me course. I was feeling very helpless.
Then I remembered Port 25. What are the odds a 50+ year old educational psychologists would know what ports are and what port 25 is used for? A better question would be should I have to know what ports are so that I can run a wiki?
I called the computer help desk. “Is the university blocking port 25?”, I asked. “Yes we are” was the reply. From this point on I will have to approximate my comments a bit. “It would have been nice if you would have taken the time to contact those of us who run servers before you did that” I suggested. “I spent a lot of time assuming something had gone wrong with my server.” “We did not know how to find all the servers that are out there” was the justification for noting letting me know that my server would stop sending email without notice.
Port 25 is used for email (80 is for http, 21,22 for ftp, etc.). The university decided that by blocking port 25 those servers responsible for unknown email spam could be eliminated. Sure enough blocking port 25 eliminates email spam should my server have been sending spam. Blocking port 25 also prevented students from gaining access to the wiki to complete course assignments.
Since I am still in a problem solving mode, how would I locate servers so that those individuals responsible might be contacted? I would probably scan for machines on the net with port 80 open, I would use the server names to identify the department associated with the IP address hosting the server (grabe.psych.und.nodak.edu is as one might guess in the Psych department), and I would call or email the chairs of such departments and ask them to inform anyone in the department running a server that the email port would be blocked.
I am feeling better now. Thanks for reading. Remember, if something goes wrong, it may not be your fault. 😉
I encountered an interesting tutorial on generating “pencil sketches” from photos on the Graphics Reporter (Lesa King) web site (this was the feature and will not likely be what you see if you wait to connect). The tutorial explained the technique in Photoshop (which I don’t use), but a little experimentation with Photoshop Elements produced a reasonable result.
I have a personal interest in the benefits of student multimedia authoring (e.g., web design, blogging, video production). The idea is that students author products associated with their content area study and I assume they benefit from such activity. To me, this idea is not a huge leap of faith. Educators have been promoting and researchers have been evaluating writing to learn and writing across the curriculum for years. Large scale multimedia projects might be viewed as an alternative to a term paper. Smaller scale projects are more the equivalent of other less utilized writing to learn tasks.
Our interest in student authoring is not unique – many interested in K-12 technology applications have encouraged multimedia projects. Often, this approach has been identified as constructivist. The difficulty I have with this label is that it appears to mean different things to different people. When I think of a learning theory, I assume the theory is an effort to describe how learning happens. To me, the idea that a theory is about a technique is misguided. It seems possible that different technqiues might result in better or poorer learning, but inappropriate to label some technigues as constructivist and some not. So I see theories as constructivist (i.e., learning requires the integration of what is known with new experiences) or not, but not experiences. My professional training involved a focus on information processing theory – I understand info processing theory as an attempt to explain some of the details of constructivism (which to me lacks attention to the specifics of learning).
Anyway, my wife sent me a reference to a blog entry summarizing an Educational Psychologist article (Kirschner, Sweller, Clark – 2006) critical of constructivism, discovery learning, experiential learning, etc. A draft of the Kirschner, et al. article can be found using a link from the blog (the journal publication date listed on the draft is incorrect and should be 41(2) – I suppose the journal got a little behind). The article argues that learners inexperienced in an area of study do poorly when allowed too much freedom in their approach to learning (hence the references to some of the very early critics of discovery learniong – e.g., Ausubel). Perhaps recognition of this reality is why some constructivists are careful to recognize the need for scaffolding. This is a good analysis and understanding such issues is important.Some of these topics remind me of political controversies – i.e., your approach is boring and meaningless, students can’t learn about topics for which they have no background.Comments on the Kirschner, et al paper seem to be rippling through the educational blogs. The day after the original version of this post the Connectivism blog commented on the same article. If the distinction between constructionism and constructivism is of interest to you the connectivism post has much more detail (too many isms for me to explain).
What I like about Kirschner’s approach is the connection (pardon my use of this term) with the empirical literature. Those taking a contrasting position seems to rely on philosophy, anecdote, and personal reflection. The Kirschner article, Mayer’s Ed Psychologist article, and a historical series of similar complaints (e.g., Ausubel) seem to beg for engagement in a “scientific” debate. If no data exists to counter their concerns, perhaps the first step would be admit this problem and then at least outline the types of demonstrations and the data types that could be used to argue for a different position.
NECC (National Educational Computing Conference) is coming up in a little over a week. NECC was the occasion of my initial blog posts (back in 2002) and I have posted from NECC since. For me, it is possibly the best conference for learning about K-12 technology innovation. NECC has since organized bloggers. I don’t participate in the organized venture – too much pressure to generate a body of focused content for me.
David Warlick proposes that those who attend and blog tag their blogs NECC06. This practice will provide some evidence of the impact of the conference (check Technorati) and also allow interested parties to locate NECC related posts. A good idea I think.
Perseus offers statistics and comments on the blogosphere. The 2005 survey indicates that blogging is still growing and lists blogspot as the leader in number of accounts (about 8 million). Some stats relevant to this site – women account for 68% of blogs AND 58% of bloggers are in the 13-18 year-old range (my age group contributes .3% 😉 ).
An ad sponsoring the local news this evening asked television viewers to act in opposition to the Snowe-Dorgan “Internet Freedom Preservation” bill (Net Neutrality). The ad included a web address (http://www.handsoff.org/). Senator Dorgan is from ND, but this ad may be airing everywhere.
My previous post in support of the concept of net neutrality focused on an issue that the “hands off” site describes as “access tiering” – a practice in which network owners charge more for certain services or control the speed of a category of informtion packets.
I understand the issue of access tiering, but I am attempting to understand the competing position. Is it that the providers are claiming they need new revenue opportunities to encourage development of an enhanced net? What is unclear to me is whether new revenue opportunities would imply that existing user opportunities would go away? For example, would a VOIP channel without “break ups” be added if “free” Skype audio communication can be degraded or would a VOIP channel be available for a fee and Skype would continue be available for those willing to tolerate the service as is?
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