Law, Policy—and IT?

U.S. political culture suffers from a paucity of policy qua policy thinking. In this sense, I refer to "Big 'P' " policy, as in national policy. Whether about medical care, gun control or international relations, this paucity exists, and technology and education are no exceptions. The effect is pernicious. In technology, it lends itself to such issues as "crisis in cyber-security," "the growing digital divides" or the "dangerous diminution of privacy."

Tomorrow American University's Washington College of Law, Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, inaugurates the Cherry Blossoms Conference on Federal Intellectual Property Policy: Accessibility, Copyright and New Technologies.

Last spring when the Northern District of Georgia issued a decision in the Cambridge University Press, et al. v. Becker, et al. observers viewed it rightfully as a victory for higher education. The recent decision in Kirtsaeng, DBA Bluechristines99 v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. suggests that optimism about copyright reform may not be restricted to colleges and universities. It would appear that where the executive keeps a blind eye, and where the legislature is too paralyzed to act, the judiciary is stepping into the future.

The California Legislature is considering a bill "to require the state’s 145 public colleges and universities to grant credit for low-cost online courses offered by outside groups, including classes offered by for-profit companies.

Obviously time has come for Harvard to have a community conversation on access and privacy of electronic content. This conversation should address conflicts among and between policies and especially those rules that vest permissions and authority differently per campus constituencies.

A couple of days ago, New York Times Columnist Charles Blow wrote of how big debt is the "dangerous new normal" for young graduates.

At this juncture I would like to say a few words about MOOCs. First, let’s level set: MOOC is an acronym for Massive Open Online Classroom. While distance education is as old at least as correspondence courses, MOOCs are distinguishable as using Internet technologies to bring free education to students globally. The erstwhile Stanford professor – erstwhile because his “experiment” created such an uproar and opportunity that he has since left Stanford to found his own MOOC company, Udacity, -- who spearheaded this term set off a tipping point for a generation of efforts in what is otherwise known as “distance” or “distributed” education.

Reviewing the spectrum of challenges leads us to think about pedagogy itself. Rote test questions and answers increasingly are not how students learn, if they were ever useful for anything more than a benchmark of basic facts.