What SOPA Means For Education, Technology, and the Future of the Internet

Jeff Dunn

There’s a lot of talk about the Stop Online Piracy Act (“SOPA”) right now and for good reason. The future of the Internet depends on the outcome of these discussions. That’s because a controversial pair of bills are making their way through congress and they would definitely affect you. SOPA is essentially an Internet Kill Switch that lets the US Attorney General force an Internet Service Provider to stop all traffic to a particular site within 5 days.

SOPA could be problematic for some educational websites. For example, not all education technology apps and websites have the proper copyright permission for every single image or video they use. If they ever run into trouble that has legal ramifications, SOPA could play a role. While I think that education-oriented websites are not the target of SOPA, it would be a shame if they were caught in the cross-fire.

It would also mean big problems for people looking to start their own education technology company. Young entrepreneurs worry about the bill possibly stunting intellectual and technological advancement in the country.

Continued at: http://edudemic.com/2011/12/sopa-guide/

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• How SOPA’s ‘circumvention’ ban could put a target on Tor (news.cnet.com)

VIDEO: Predicting 2012: Embrace the Future of Admissions and Enrollment, or Else!

As the calendar turns over, schools can’t sit still. This webinar will present detailed analysis of what pushed top performing marketing, admissions, and enrollment departments to success in 2011 and what they will need to do differently to succeed in the new year. Higher education is a quickly evolving playing field that is dangerous for leadership that is slow to react and an opportunity for agile schools to thrive.

View the video: http://todayscampus.com/articles/load.aspx?art=2956

In Praise of The Good Enough College

By Lisa Belkin

If you are the parent of a high school senior, this is only secondarily the Holiday Season. It is, front and center, the College Season. The jolliness of your mood might well depend on what news your child did or didn’t receive in an Early Decision letter the past week or so, and whether the dozen or so applications they will likely be filing by the turn of the year are anywhere near finished by now.

“The letter from Vanderbilt said it was the MOST COMPETITIVE application year EVER,” the woman in the high end boutique crowed to her friend. Her son had just gotten in. And the fact that he’d beaten the highest odds EVER was a point of pride to his mom. Of course that EVER has been true of every school for every year in at least the past decade. It just keeps getting more competitive. And parents keep taking it more personally.

By http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-belkin/parents-college_b_1157864.html?ref=college&ir=College

The Search for Sustainable OER

By Keith Hampson

OER or open educational resources is one of the good news stories of 2011. OER takes many forms, but what binds initiatives like The Khan Academy, MIT OCW (Open Course Ware) and Stanford’s AI course is that they are all freely available to learners and other educators. It’s the “free” characteristic that has caught the attention of the press. In the context of higher education news stories about rising costs, tuition and student debt, this is our “man bites dog” news story.

Despite the importance of “free” to OER, there’s been little written about the economics of OER. How, specifically, can we make it sustainable? Even Taylor Walsh’s book on OER, Unlocking the Gates: How and Why Universities are Opening Up Access to their Courses, resisted challenging the logic of multimillion-dollar OER projects without revenue streams.

Continued at: http://todayscampus.com/article/The_Search_for_Sustainable_OER

Related articles

• Taking OER beyond the OER Community (downes.ca)