the screen shot says it all:

Top student searches top 10 include Loan, loan consolidation, loan forgiveness, credit cards, loans with cosigner, studentloan.com, loan calculator...  Only thing missing from the list is Usury.

I am currently half way through my first quarter teaching at the University of Washington's Information School.  This has been a great experience thus far.  We have covered topics as diverse as John Rawls' Theory of Justice, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Bilski, software patents, the Access to Justice Technology Principles and disability rights in text to speech. The class I am teaching is IMT550:  Policy, Law, and Ethics in Information Management , and the iSchool has given me a lot of license in constructing the syllabus for this class. I kept the same basic topics that I have been in other iterations of this class while adding three major additions patents, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Access to Justice Technology Principles. I see a grounding in ethics as an important prerequisite to engaging in information policy issues.

In running this class I am working to create a envorment where students can explore ethical issues both in the classroom and in the larger technology community.  To connect with the larger technology community I assigned several blogs to follow and am requiring each student to write 2 blog posts.  These blog post may be made directly to the class website or made privately on the class list server.  The best part of the class thus far has been the student's blog posts which cover some amazing topics including:
Who is more evil, Google or the Chinese government?
User-centered Privacy Principles
Facebook and Privacy Changes
ISPs – Copyright Cops?
Can social media replace the news?
Global Photograph Album – who wants to be in the picture? (google street view)
Whole Body Imaging Technology and Body Scanners (w/ images)
Supreme Court Ruling on Corporate Spending Limits
Changing the way we see things (3d tv)
Should Business Methods be Patentable?

This is just a sampling of the topics that have been covered.  With topics like The Cape Town Open Education Declaration, the Google Book Settlement and  Wikileaks.org still to come I am curious to see where the online and offline discussions go.

Outside of the blogging assignments each student is also required to give a 5 minute ignite like talk on a topic of their choosing and  do a group project evaluating the information management policies of a cooperation.

Two quick notes on the class website:

1. Ideally I would have run the blog through UW's iSchool site.  I worked with a graduate assistant for 2 two weeks trying to get something set up, but the ischool's servers do not currently support blogging.  The GA eventually just sent me a wordpress.com account for the class to use.  At that point I decided to just host the site on my dreamhost account which makes updating and maintenance a lot easier.  I thought it was best to put the class site in an online location that would be easy to leave up for archival purposes.

2. I wish I had found this before the class stated WordPress as a Learning Management System - it is a great article on doing just what I am doing now with wordpress.

Great talk, information overload is often related to an inability to filter what comes in.  For the longest time had a love/hated relationship BoingBoing, this changed when I learned to filter for Cory and Xeni, and wait for my friends to share other worthy posts.  With other blogs I often look for someone like Kevin Donovan or Sarah Davies who do a great job reading through several blogs and sharing the better stuff via tools like Google Readers shared /w a note function.  The fact that people like Kevin and Sarah are willing to share with thier friends saves us all time.  One of the keys to managing your information is finding tools that allow you to leverage your network to filter the ever growing stream of new information.

Filtering & privacy points:
"facebook has the best expressed and best executed privacy management tools on any network"

"the problem is managing your privacy preferences is an unnatural act"

"Privacy was inefficiency in the system"

I strongly agree the current systems is extremely good at sharing information, what I call sharing others may (especially lawyers but not usually techie geeks) call a violation of privacy. This does not look good for privacy, the cost of filtering out information is so much higher then the cost of production and distribution that something has to give.  Although when privacy and free speech come into conflict, I am almost always on the side of free speech.

For people wanting to learn more about TEDx Seattle. This Friday there is a Happy Hour and TEDxSeattle Discussion at the Rat and Raven.

Here is the announcement from the Master of Communication in Digital Media list:

This Friday, in addition to our usual socializing and networking at our First Fridays Happy Hour, we will be having a discussion about where we stand so far on TEDxSeattle.

As part of this discussion, we'll have Tim Reha presenting his ideas for filming, streaming and live synthing the event with his internet dashboard approach.  Tim will be looking for student volunteers to learn about this approach and work on the TEDxSeattle event.  He hopes to pitch this work to the main TED based on our efforts here.  This presentation will go on around 6:00, once Hanson and the campus crew arrive.

We'll be in our normal spot at the Rat and Raven (http://www.ratandraven.com), conveniently located in the University District.

5260 University Way NE Seattle, WA 98105 - 206 524 3166

Street parking up there on the Ave is free and available at that time.  Happy hour specials include $2 off the entire menu (bar food, mostly standard with some twists); $3 wells, $3 domestic drafts and $4 imports (and $2 PBR if that is to your taste). We have reserved the *upstairs deck* (covered year-round, heated in cool weather, but open for nice weather).  It also has a shuffleboard.  There are also two pool tables upstairs, just outside the glass doors to the deck.

TEDx Seattle is happening at the Pacific Science Center on April 10th.  The event is being TEDx Seattle is organized by the Master of Communication in Digital Media (MCDM) program at the University of Washington.  One of the most exciting parts of TEDx Seattle is that they are strongly considering creating an interactive website for the event that promotes social media in real time.

Here are my two favorite confirmed speakers:

Ben Huh – icanhascheezburger.comBen is the CEO of the Cheezburger Network, the company behind the hugely popular blogs I Can Has Cheezburger?, FAIL Blog, There, I Fixed It, and more than 25 others. His job is to make the Internet laugh for 5-minutes a day.  In addition to making people laugh, Ben is a a true innovator in business models for user generated content websites.

Eugene Cho - Founder - www.onedayswages.org

Eugene Cho and his family began what became onedayswages.org when they made a decision to donate their 2009 income ($68,000) to the cause of fighting extreme global poverty. But we didn't want to stop there. We also wanted to invite our family, friends, and the rest of the world to consider donating just their "one day's wages" and be part of this international grassroots movement. And then to renew that pledge monthly, quarterly, or at least yearly, on their birthdays.

The complete TEDx Seattle list of speakers can be found here.

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The Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. FEC offends me (I know this is not a lawyerly thing to say, but this turns my stomach) as it allows corporations to pour large amounts of money into elections by equating corporate spending to free speech. The best response I have seen is bellow form Umair Haque:

Dear Supreme Court,

I'm highly impressed with your recent decision to vaporize limits on corporate political spending. It's the kind of campaign finance reform our ailing res publica needs. In fact, I found it so inspirational, here's an even better idea.

Let's give corporations the right to vote. One share, one vote. The logic? It's simple. Corporations are people; all people are created equal; ergo, corporations must have equal rights — and no right is more important than the right to vote. (Well, maybe the right to buy fully automatic machine guns, but that's another story).

Goldman Sachs, for example, has 514,080,000 shares outstanding — so they'd get 514 millon votes (in fact, maybe we should give them more, because they're so smart). Ford has 3.31 billion shares outstanding, so they'd get approximately 2.8 billion more votes than Goldman.

I've discussed this with several other economists, and we all agree: it's the most efficient solution. Why, it should save hundreds of millions in lobbying alone. Who needs K Street when corporations can simply, quickly, easily vote in the candidate of their choice? As a bonus, political scientists agree that the increasing polarization between left and right would quickly disappear, too. Human people — with their perpetual squabbling — would be simply outvoted by corporate people, who know what's good for everyone.

Read the rest at the Harvard Business Review

Watch Lessig's Video on fixing elections at Change Congress

I am still looking for a good human readable legal summary and will post it when I see one.

The Google Policy Fellowship applications are now open.  I highly recommend applying if you are interested in policy work.  Working at Public Knowledge last summer was amazing.  I was able to get first hand experience with the FCC, the Copyright Office and some amazing nonprofits in the DC area like KEI and EPIC.

This years sponsoring organizations includes a few new orgs:

American Library Association
Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic
Cato Institute
Center for Democracy and Technology
The Citizen Lab
Competitive Enterprise Institute
Creative Commons
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Future of Music Coalition
Internet Education Foundation
Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies
Media Access Project
National Hispanic Media Coalition
New America Foundation
Progress and Freedom Foundation
Public Knowledge
Technology Policy Institute

The application deadline is December 28, 2009.  Apply at the fellowship page.  Please feel free to ping me if you want to know more information about my experience last summer.

Amazing TED talk on mythology, liner time and cyclical time, binary logic and fuzzy logic. This talk covers a lot of why I am so attached to Rashomon and mythology!

I will need to re-watch it a few times to see if it holds up over time but my first impression is that this could on par with Wade Davis and Hans Hosling.

I am headed over to UW at noon for talk that looks very interesting:

Research Conversation: 'Technology and Disability in the Developing World' Speaker: Joyojeet Pal
JOYOJEET PAL is an NSF Computing Innovation fellow at the ATLAS institute at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His work primarily looks at issues around technology and development. He is also a research affiliate with the TASCHA group at UW's iSchool.

ABSTRACT
In the past decades, advances in technology and the growth of a rights based movement around disability has led to an increasing interest in issues of accessibility from scholars and practitioners, technologists and social scientists alike. However, much research and practice in this space is located in the industrialized world. This talk discusses the need for developing an agenda on issues of accessibility in the developing world in view of the importance of technology tools for social and economic inclusion. This talk discusses the need for broadening work in this space, especially in information schools.

Date: Monday, November 30, 2009
Time: 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
Location: Mary Gates Hall 420
More Info: Event Website

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Feel free to ping me if anyone wants to connect after the talk.