Comments on: Corporate Web 2.0 in Education

By: Steve

Steve — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 12:01:26 +0000

Jim,

I have fought hard to keep our school’s student work on an open platform. Quietly tucked away on our shared server space is a WPMu for student blogging and a few MediaWiki installations, along with a handful of other projects. Consistently our IT person has tried to push us toward corporate solutions like Gmail. There have been attempts to persuade me toward, I kid you not, Disney sponsored webspaces and others sponsored by billionaires.

The fact is that there is pervasive distrust for the open and a yearning for the familiar embrace of the brands we have been conditioned to know and love.

Someday, perhaps we too shall have an epiphany:

“He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

The graphic from your link looks all too real. It won’t be long now!

By: Jim Groom

Jim Groom — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 06:55:27 +0000

Here is a link to the image, seems to have gotten stripped:
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/10/28/net.neutrality.chart.jpg

By: Jim Groom

Jim Groom — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 06:54:39 +0000

Steve,
We’re ready to be battered over the head, but I’m just seeing gems like these. And while I must admit easy enough yu liked it, but in the end that doesn;t matter as much as what we do with all this now. We have excellent examples out there, there are many. Why can;t we make the appropriation of some parts of our identity and data, some modicum of control—even if filtered through the all seeing Google eye—over our own spaces, and cultivate individual and even institutional development of people and resources for re-igniting some interest in one of the most important economic, social, and political realities of our lifetime—the struggle for an open web. I mean I may be speaking too quickly here, but seems like the Verizon/Google deal seems like a huge blow for the promise of net neutrality, and as one of the digital storytelling students noted last semester, or internet could like like this quite soon:

Amazing what a simple link can lead us to, we have forgotten the wonder of the internet, and are proceeding to hide and monetize every last trace of that failing memory.

If universities are already in the can, we could very well be done…or maybe not.