Doug Noon, at Borderland, has posted a powerful statement about the House of Representative’s passage of HR5319, DOPA. The article is called DOPA and the New Bubble. Noon also references a posting at Techcrunch, one of the top technology blogs on the Net. Read US House: Schools must block MySpace, many other sites.
I think that this is important — to spread this conversation beyond educators and into the community at large.
Sign the SAVE YOUR SPACE petition opposing HR5319.
Although HR5319 is titled the “Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA)”, the bill is very misleading. What most people don’t realize is that this bill is misleading. If you take a closer look at DOPA, you’ll find that this legislation actually limits your rights to access and express yourself on the Internet instead of “deleting online predators”. But before this legislation becomes law, there are several more steps including getting approval by the Senate and, ultimately, being signed by President George W. Bush.
Unfortunately, the public only sees what the media and politicians tell them. They need to hear from the actual users of social networking sites.
The SAVE YOUR SPACE petition is your chance to be heard and to show the public, the media and the U.S. government the importance and amazing power of social networking sites.
Help us get 1,000,000 signatures in 1 month.
Visit http://www.saveyourspace.org for details.
David — Will has a recent post that also references this. Here’s the thing: isn’t this what you have been saying all along? We need to tell the story so that people outisde the edutech world can grasp it? It is about finding the archetypal narrative that best characterizes this story. We went to the moon not only because John Kennedy said we should, but because he tapped into an aechetypal narrative: a race. America loves a race. So what’s this archetypal narrative? “The World Is Flat” is about a race, too — to the top or the bottom, depending on which chapters you focus on most. Is this the narrative? The race of rour kids not to become irrelevant in a flat world?
A very good question, Scott. Right off the top of my head, I think that the narrative belongs to the kids.
More than any generation before, their future belongs to them. It will be what they make it. For this reason alone, the conversation that is education should involve the learner as much as it does the teacher, and the teacher should be the learner as well. This is why social networking is so important to them within the context of their classrooms.
As they make their own future, they should also be intimately involved in making their learning.
So what is that archetypal story? The quest? Isn\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\’t there one of the Arthurian legends where the Holy Grail appears to the assembled knights and then disappears. They all agree to go in search, but that it would be shameful to do so as a group. So they set out individually, each entering the forest alone at the point where it was darkest. In other words, each person had their own quest and had to follow their own path. Have we sent our children out on a quest into the dark forest of the future, and must they enter the forest alone and where it is darkest?