Day: June 10, 2006

Byron vs. COPE

Byron Dorgan (Democrat from ND) appears to be playing a central role in maintaining net neutrality (Save the Internet analysis).

The battle for Net Neutrality – or Internet freedom – has significantly stronger bipartisan support in the Senate. Senators Snowe (R-Maine) and Dorgan (D-N.D.) have introduced the “Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2006? that enjoys the strong support from the SaveTheInternet coalition.

Supposed threats to the Internet have floated through listservs in the past, but mostly these have been false issues. The COPE (pdf of legislation provided by Benton Foundation) legislation (you may recognize the phrase net neutrality) is very real and Internet users should pay attention.

COPE would allow providers to exercise control over the priority allowed different information types (again my interpretation). I know that my university does this to keep the university use of the Internet within assigned bandwidth limits (e.g., MP3 traffic is slowed during the day and allowed to move faster after hours). The difference is that the major providers could apply such priorities to their own advantage – e.g., those with an interest in traditional long distance could slow VOIP traffic to the point the low quality made such options useless.

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What is Google working on?

I encountered a post by Ryan Paul describing a Google research project. As I understand the post, Google researchers have been able to capture audio from a television program, analyze the audio, and use the information gained from the analysis to suggest web links a viewer might investigate to gain more information associated with the topics covered on the television program. Again, if I understand the technology, the technique identifies the show from the pattern of the input (it does not actually understand the text) and then provides links matched to a  database of programs identified by pattern fingerprints.

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Class Wiki

I am teaching a course this summer focused on multimedia authoring. In keeping with the focus of the class, the students and I will be creating a wiki. On a theoretical level, I find the idea of communal authoring very intriguing. On a practical level, I can’t escape the concern that the work of my students will be vandalized. It is not so much that the original material cannot be recovered, it is more the problem of what comments are inserted and how those who work in K-12 settings interpret such experiences. What is the point of working with such environments if the participants are then unwilling to transfer the experiences to new situations.

In keeping with this concern, I have locked the wiki down to the most conservative level allowed. As system administrator, I must enroll users who then select a new password. Using this approach, MediaWiki allows all enrolled users to edit all posts. What I would prefer would be a different set of constraints – a user could protect personal posts, but unprotected pages could be edited by anyone. Perhaps I have yet to discover the combination of settings that allow such options.

I will likely offer more comments on my experiences with a class-based wiki as I see how things go. It is really not possible to say too much about such technologies based on what one accomplish with the software alone. This is one of those areas in which you really need a combination of technology skills and experience with the tools in action.

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