Legal Issues Article and Legal Issues Article 2 are found here.
First, in reading the summary of the CIPA, it seems, while well intentioned, to stop far short of providing cut and dry guidelines. Who defines what is obscene, or harmful to minors? Perhaps there are legal thresholds I am personally unaware of?
Second, COPPA operates on the honor system; how many 12 year olds do you know who are more than willing to claim to be an adult? Who verifies this? Granted, for schools, this is easily verifiable, and obviously, the disclaimer in school sites works well for legal cya, but in terms of global or “big picture” concerns, I don’t know if this is effective…
The FERPA section is quite interesting, as it suggests that the digital divide might come into play, let alone records that are of a nature that they should never be exposed to anything beyond the intranet of a district anyway. Face to face contact is still necessary then?
The Communications Decency Act just plain seems contrary to common sense. If I build a pool in my backyard, don’t put a fence around it, and the neighbor’s child drowns in it, even if they were a terribly neglected child who never had adult supervision, parental or otherwise, I am still liable as I have created an attractive nuissance and not taken steps to prevent access of said child. Why are content providers not liable?
And, as was addressed in class, what on earth protects the one’s without the deep pockets and legal teams of school districts, the teacher? All of these districts identify acceptable use, and reference laws that would make the district liable, but they don’t have anything, anything at all, that is concerned with teacher liability, as near as I can tell. As a matter of fact, the district I looked into in detail, Lexington 2, seemed only concerned with making plain that the district had taken whatever steps they felt necessary to “protect students” which can be understood as protecting themselves from liability under the CIPA, the DMCA, and SC State Law.
Also, what about webarchive.org? Granted, it takes knowing the url, but well, there it is…
It would seem that there are some fights to be picked, maybe, because the bottom line comes down to what is this trend of dividing and putting teachers on the defensive, constantly having to police their actions to such a degree that they avoid demonstrating their humanity to their students, in terms of pedagogical concerns. What are the implicit valuations we are placing within the instructional environment by acting in this way? What are we teaching students about technology, ethics, and frankly, about being adults, by having such policies in place?
And on a side note: The Freedom Writers book sounds awesome… once the Summer II overage shows, that is getting ordered.
http://www.freedomwritersfoundation.org
Copyright…. oi. Talk about irony of using Disney to take on the evil empire of Disney. Already linked the video on Facebook…
I went looking for the source, and found this, the Fair Use Project at Stanford, which has some very interesting stuff in regards to copyright law, and the insanity of current copyright law.
Somewhat related to a previous post… zotero seems like an awesome tool, but well, what happens when the MLA puts out Handbook 7, or better yet, if Zotero goes down or ceases to be available? I am all about the MLA citation cheat sheet, but well, not learning this directly in some what seems to leave students unable to do citation formating without these tools. Of course, they probably said the same thing about graphing calculators, though as far as I know, they do still teach graphing by hand.
