Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.
Outfit your students for life in the wild, wild Web where they need the savvy to shoot straight, watch their backs, and to be at home on the digital range. The choices today’s learners make, and actions they take online, have enduring impact on their lives and the lives of others. Unique, unforeseeable, and evolving risks and challenges are part and parcel of the open Internet.
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On February 26th the world, as we know it, will either come to an end or we will have the second coming of the messiah.
Why? Because later this week the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will vote to reclassify broadband internet service as a telecommunications service, rather than an information service, under Title II of the Telecommunications Act—a decision which will have a significant impact on education.
With a handful of exceptions, the policy wonks and industry pundits have taken binary positions on the regulation of the internet, but there is more at stake than the Washington politics and beltway posturing: mainly, the issue of education as a basic human right and how the regulation of the internet may affect those rights.…Read More
An industry body representing some of the biggest names in technology has hosted a closed-door meeting to discuss the future of the open internet, BBC News reports. Public advocacy groups said such back-room dealings were detrimental. The meeting follows the publication of a controversial plan by Google and Verizon that could allow net providers certain types of internet traffic to be given priority over others. Consumer bodies called those proposals an “internet killer.” Last week a crowd of about 100 people marched to Google’s headquarters in California to present boxes that they said contained 300,000 signatures upholding the values of net neutrality, a founding principle of the net that states that all web data is treated equally no matter where it comes from. The Google/Verizon plan suggests loopholes for mobile traffic and for some specialized content…
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A federal court threw the future of internet regulations and U.S. broadband expansion plans into doubt April 6 with a far-reaching decision that went against the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The ruling poses a major hurdle for federal policy that school and college administrators hoped would ensure the growth of online education and make high-speed internet affordable for even the smallest school systems and campuses.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the FCC lacks the authority to require broadband providers to give equal treatment to all internet traffic flowing over their networks. That was a big victory for Comcast Corp., the nation’s largest cable company, which had challenged the FCC’s authority to impose such “net neutrality” obligations on broadband providers.
The ruling marks a serious setback for the FCC, which is trying to adopt official net-neutrality regulations. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, a Democrat, argues that such rules are needed to prevent phone and cable companies from using their control over internet access to favor some online content and services over others.…Read More