Day: January 23, 2007

State Of The Union

I decided I was going to mark the uniqueness of this year’s State of the Union address by participating in a unique way. I have a CNN Pipeline account so I decided to watch via the Internet. Unfortunately, CNN decided to use the occasion of the event to allow anyone to try Pipeline. The consequences, at least for me, were not good. Normally, the video and sound come through with high quality. For the first part of the speech this evening, nothing worked. The feed constantly rebuffered allowing only a few seconds of video. About half way through things improved. I am thinking that most folks decided to try the trusty TV allowing those of us who were more stubborn the opportunity to use the net.

One can only imagine what direction variations on this type of application and opportunity might take. What about a digg-like system allowing a show of support or rejection following different claims or proposals?

President Bush

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DOPA is Back

Before the elections, potential DOPA (Deleting Online Predators Act) legislation was the target of posts on many educational blogs (including Learning Aloud). Now, it appears that active consideration of DOPA legislation is back.

How could anyone object to measures intended to thwart potential online predators? It is the means and not the goal (see my previous comments) that generates objections – blocking commercial social networking sites including commercial blog sites. Blocking potentially useful activities represents a significant down side. Failure to confront the most serious problems gives the appearance of doing something while accomplishing little (unsupervised access to the Internet outside of the school results in what data appear to indicate are the most serious problems). This is an issue with a political slant – the appearance that one is “fighting” for our kids sounds good and it may not be obvious what is lost when blocking a hodge-podge of sites.

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