Mistaken Goal: Where Student Affairs & Technology Meet

Rumor around the water cooler is that we may see a vote for the Higher Education Reauthorization Act today. The House of Representatives has passed the Higher Education Reauthorization Act with similar action expected of the Senate very soon. We’ve been following this for quite a while with interest focused primarily on the portion of the act that focuses on peer-to-peer file sharing and online copyright infringement. For those who have not been following this bill or this portion of the bill, the version of the bill that has been negotiated between the House and the Senate requires colleges and universities:

• Educate students
  • Inform them that unlawful online copyright infringement is unlawful
  • Summarize the penalties for violating Federal copyright laws
  • Inform them about the institution’s online copyright infringement policies and disciplinary actions
• Develop plans to “effectively combat the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material, including through the use of a variety of technology-based deterrents”
• “Offer alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property”

(The precise language can be found in the bill on pages 221-222 and page 237; be warned that this is a long and somewhat large pdf file.)

The Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed are both covering this story although their coverage is much broader than focusing on this one issue. William Patry, Google’s Senior Copyright Counsel, has blasted the online copyright infringement portions of this bill and I’m sure that there are others who are doing the same if you poke around; Steve Worona has done so from a particularly privileged viewpoint as EDUCAUSE’s Director of Policy & Networking Programs. EDUCAUSE has signed an ACE letter that fulfills Doug Lederman’s prediction from a few days ago that “groups will spend much of the next day or two carefully wording letters that neither badmouth the legislation (and by extension those members of Congress who crafted it) nor endorse it.”

As noted by Patry, the discussion from the participants in the conference meeting that resolved the differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill is very interesting and informative. If you really want to dig into this, the relevant material can be found on page 558 of the relevant report (same document as above, same warning: long and large pdf file). Patry has copied and pasted, with comments and discussion, the relevant material on his blog if you want to avoid digging through the pdf.

It looks like the bill will pass both houses and be made into law so it seems to be time to accept the inevitable and being planning on how work with or around these new laws. It may be worth taking several steps back to view the bill in its entirety as it does appear to do many good things but it’s incredibly disappointing to see once again how money influences and corrupts our legislative processes and participants.

(Updated July 31 at 2151 EST to reflect passage in the House)

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I know that I’ve been neglecting this blog for quite some time.  I’ve spent my time blogging over at the NASPA Tech Tools program.  That program is now formally completed so my time and attention will now swing back over to this blog.

More importantly, we’ve opened up all of the material in that program (an 8-week series of blog posts introducing different technologies to student affairs professionals) to everyone; it was previously limited to NASPA members.  All of the original content is licensed under a Creative Commons license so we hope that others will be able to save time and energy by reusing some of the content we developed.

Overall, I am very pleased with how the program turned out.  I am most pleased with the support we received from NASPA throughout the entire program.  The format is a new approach for NASPA and I don’t know if it will be tried for other content but it seemed to make the most sense for this content, particularly as using a blog to present the material was a visible and ongoing demonstration of one of the technologies introduced.  It also fed right into other technologies we discussed such as RSS, tagging and folksonomies, and videos (God bless Lee LeFever and his “… in Plain English” videos!).  NASPA was also completely open when we told them that we wanted to register a new domain name and hosted service.  I was a bit apprehensive to ask to do that but the technical requirements dictated that approach.  It was the right move as it not only allowed us to easily conduct this program (mad props to Christina Dulude who wrote the custom WordPress plugin that made the blog accessible only to logged-in NASPA members!) but it also gives the Technology Knowledge Community a platform for continued experimentation.

I am also very pleased with the content and how it all turned out.  I am particularly fond of how we covered blogs and RSS and I hope participants got a lot out of those two topics as they seem to be the ones that can most immediately make their jobs and lives easier and more interesting.  There were some topics that were more difficult than others to cover because they’re a bit hard to cover in just one or two blog posts.  And, of course, there are topics that we couldn’t cover during the program.  I dearly wish we could have found some way to look at mobile technologies.  I also wish we could have spent more time exploring the cultural changes intertwined with many of these technologies.

In terms of how popular the program was, Awstats and Google Analytics both tell me that there were only a few hundred unique visitors.  I’m curious to see how and if that will change now that non-NASPA members can access the content.  And even “just a few hundred” participants is still a good turnout for such a unique kind of program and larger than many other programs!

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