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Professor Landfeldt, one of Australia's leading telecommunications experts, says some of the fundamental flaws of the scheme raised in his report include: � All filtering systems will be easily circumvented using readily available software. � Censors maintaining the blacklist will never be able to keep up with the amount of new content published on the web every second. � Filters using real-time analysis of sites to determine whether content is inappropriate are not effective, capture wanted content, are easy to bypass and slow network speeds exponentially as accuracy increases. � Entire user-generated content sites such as YouTube and Wikipedia could be blocked over a single video or article. � Filters would be costly and difficult to implement for ISPs and put many smaller ISPs out of business. � While the communciations authority's blacklist would be withheld from internet users, all 700 ISPs would have access to it, so it could easily be leaked. � The filters would not censor content on peer-to-peer file sharing networks such as LimeWire, chat rooms, email and instant messaging; � ISPs and the Government could be legally liable for the scheme's failures, particularly as content providers have no right to appeal against being blocked unnecessarily.

Simplistic thinking is often applied to educational technology. Either it’s the greatest approach to education ever invented or it’s a waste of money.

weak arguments, such as “students are digital natives, so we should use more technology,”

Digital technology provides a powerful toolkit, offering unique advantages (such as bridging time and distance, democratizing access to information and services, and leveraging exponential increases in computer power) that have helped transform other organizations, especially those based on information and knowledge

I think eduBuzz.org has helped create not just this, but far more in terms of explicit reflection that wasn't there before. I'm wondering whether reflection is, in fact, a personal, private thing rather than a community issue, since often the community at large may not choose to be 'interested' in what you have to say. Take live blog posts, for example, written for the author more than the audience. The biggest problem of online communities, and we've seen this, too, in East Lothian and eduBuzz.org, is that novices in particular find it hard to filter information. Angela says that the problem is one students have, but so many of our teachers and managers also have trouble filtering what is important, what is of interest and might be important, what is of interest but might be a waste of time, and what is of no interest at all, personal or professional. Teachers and students are guilty of not knowing how to question the authority of an information source, other than to say blogs must be relatively poor quality and the BBC must be of relatively high quality (both, of course, had had their moments). And again, not just students but for many teachers, too, it is not cool to have an extensive vocabulary to express oneself. We see a resistance in students to use words to say how they are feeling beyond 'good', 'bad' and fine (and I'd be advocating the use of sites like We feel fine to both educate our students and help counter this claim to some extent), and we also see resistance from some teachers to use a more extensive vocabulary to think about teaching and learning. Finally, both teachers and students, because we over test, tend to not want to do anything that doesn't fit into the test. We cut and paste without engaging with material, we can take tests but cannot learn.