The BBC is reporting an effort by the Committee To Protect Bloggers to mobilize the “blogsphere” (or as some call it, the “blogosphere”) in support of two imprisoned Iranian bloggers. (The article calls them “cyber-dissidents.”) I’m wary of supporting a cause I know so little about, but when Amnesty International responds to the situation (they’re quoted in the BBC article) I do take it very seriously. Reuters is now reporting that one of the bloggers, an Iranian journalist named Arash Sigarchi, has today been sentenced to fourteen years in prison.
So a one-month old “Committee To Protect Bloggers” can, with one call to action, quickly get the attention not only of the international press but also of UN individuals concerned with Internet governance issues. Reading through the comments on the CTPB blog on this effort is itself an education. One commenter, if he’s for real, offers particularly nuanced advice about how to make this kind of protest most effective. His name–“vb”–leads to what appears to be a preliminary report by the Working Group on Internet Governance that will eventually be submitted to the World Summit on the Information Society. The report is dated February 21, 2005–i.e., yesterday.
I am awestruck by the speed and pervasiveness these things represent, and I wonder how any institution of higher education can afford not to offer students rich, focused opportunities to reflect on, and shape, these emerging technologies. I hope that the blogosphere is indeed a potent force for human rights, but whether or not that turns out to be the case, we owe it to our students to help them reflect on the phenomenon we’re witnessing.
Good point: “how any institution of higher education can afford not to offer students rich, focused opportunities to reflect on, and shape, these emerging technologies.” Where should this take place? I think our university is typical of many in that the reflection and shaping takes place within specific disciplines, and the issues related to the technologies span several disciplines. The technology also spans what has traditionally been within the computer science discipline and what I imagine we’d call “communications” if that were represented formally at our university. The opportunities are currently scattered with a smattering here and there. That’s not terrible, but focusing it might be better.
Great comment.
There’s an interesting paradox here for educational design, I think: somehow we need to promote both focus and unfocus, both convergent and divergent thinking. The discipline-specific part makes the meta-conversation more precise and effective because there’s a distinct and focused knowledge-base and system of inquiry. The meta-conversation makes the discipline-specific part more meaningful and inspiring because it fosters new and deeper connections, sparking across those synaptic gaps, demonstrating commonalities and taking our breath away with unexpected insights.
Something like music and time, maybe, or poetry and lines.
And where should this take place? Two places come to mind. One is a rich and robust interdisciplinary studies program that is not a major, but that has a distinctive, required place in the general education curriculum. The freshman seminar is a step in this direction. The other is an e-portfolio system that integrates rich and robust IT tools (“tools for thought” a la Rheingold) into an ongoing process of reflection, rearrangement, and re-vision during the entire four years of the undergraduate education–and beyond.
Thanks for the inspiration.