A recent court decision, which struck down the Federal Communications Commission's Open Internet Order and threatened the future of Net Neutrality, has huge implications for the future of journalism and press freedom. This informational material can be used during a lesson on identifying laws regarding the use of technology and their consequences and implications.
Discover the FCC's verdict on free and open Internet with this video and educational resources from PBS NewsHour from February 26, 2015.
Note: please watch the segment of the video from 1:24-1:56, which addresses net neutrality.
The FCC's net neutrality rules were adopted to guarantee equal access to all sites on the Internet. But an appeals court ruling releases broadband providers from those guidelines, allowing them to prioritize certain traffic.
Discover how the net neutrality debate could affect consumers with this video and educational materials from PBS NewsHour from September 15, 2014. This video comes with a student viewing guide.
In this lesson, students will write a persuasive one-page editorial that takes a position in the Net Neutrality debate.
Lesson Objectives
Companies routinely track our activities online -- what we search, what we buy, what videos we watch, and what we post to social media. And while most of the time this tracking is used for targeted ads, our information can be bought and used by people in order to influence our opinions about issues or political candidates through not-so-scrupulous methods. In this Lowdown lesson, students will analyze cybersecurity risks, how information about their online activity is monitored and used, and ways they can protect their privacy online.
The lesson begins on page 26 of the document accessed via the resource link.
Students will:
- be able to define the term "trademark".
- categorize products as generic or brand name.
- identify popular trademarks.
- identify symbols associated with the protection of trademarks.
- utilize a trademark database.
- create a custom trademark and present it to the class.
Lesson begins on page 34 of the document accessed via the resource link.
- understand how copyright laws apply to creative works of authorship.
- create a work to be registered.
- define the terms: copyright, public domain, plagiarism.
- identify where on websites copyright notices are displayed and what information is included with the notice.
- identify what copyright does not protect.
-learn how to register a copyright notice.
Often, the more information we have, the better decisions we're able to make. The power of data can benefit both individuals and governments. But who can be trusted with the responsibility of having all this data? Can governments collect and use it fairly and without violating our privacy? Help students think through this question and become thoughtful influencers of data policy and practice.
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The lesson begins on page 43 of the document accessed via the resource link.
- identify different types of media as intellectual property: writings, music, videos, computer games, etc.
-understand that intellectual property laws protect online and offline material.
-understand that it is stealing from real people if one copies copyright-protected material or downloads material from the internet without permission.
-understand it is against the law to download copyright-protected videos, music, etc. from the internet without permission.
- investigate famous cases of trade secret theft.
- investigate peer-to-peer networks.
Students will review a court case and case study to determine what is protected and what may not be.
Elonis v. the United States provides the foundation for a debate on what forms of expression on social media are and are not protected by the First Amendment — and the blurry line in-between.
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The lesson elements in this module teach students about the privacy principle “Your information is larger than you think”. They are designed to be independent and flexible, so you can incorporate them into any size lesson plan. Student lesson is available at https://teachingprivacy.org/youre-leaving-footprints/.
Summary of Learning Objectives: Students can enumerate ways their online and offline activities contribute to their information “footprint”; students can use privacy settings and critical thinking skills to limit the exposure of their footprint.
Target Age: High school, college undergraduate.
The lesson elements in this module teach students about the privacy principle “Information about you on the Internet will be used by somebody in their interest — including against you”. They are designed to be independent and flexible, so you can incorporate them into any size lesson plan. Student resources are available at https://teachingprivacy.org/information-is-valuable/.
Summary of Learning Objectives: Students can give examples of how their data may be used to benefit others; students can investigate and evaluate how different online services use data, in order to make informed choices.
Unencrypted communication over the Internet works a lot like sending a postcard: it can be read by anybody along the delivery route. Communication is routed through intermediary computers and systems, which are connected to many more computers and systems. Encryption, or encoding information so it appears scrambled to anyone who doesn’t know the key, is a way to wrap a postcard in an envelope. While it can never be 100% secure, stronger encryption makes it harder for people to get to the contents.
The lesson elements in this module teach students about the privacy principle “Communication over a network, unless strongly encrypted, is never just between two parties”. They are designed to be independent and flexible, so you can incorporate them into any size lesson plan. Student resources are available at https://teachingprivacy.org/someone-could-listen/.
Summary of Learning Objectives: Students can articulate how the multi-step, multi-party pathways of networked communication affect users’ privacy; students can identify and use more secure communication options.
Learning Objectives:
Every day more data is being put online. Search engines are getting better, allowing “deeper” the searching of more types of data. Techniques for extracting and connecting information from different sources are getting more powerful. Furthermore, information that is not retrievable today may be retrievable tomorrow due to changes in terms of service, public policy, law, and technical privacy settings.
The lesson elements in this module teach students about the privacy principle “Just because something can’t be found today, doesn’t mean it can’t be found tomorrow.” They are designed to be independent and flexible, so you can incorporate them into any size lesson plan. Student resources are available at https://teachingprivacy.org/search-is-improving/.
Summary of Learning Objectives: Students can explain how changes in technology and regulations can affect who has access to their data; students can use techniques to monitor and limit the exposure of their data.
Creating an identity on the Internet or impersonating somebody else is often just a matter of a few clicks. Currently, there is no foolproof way to match a real person with their online identity. This means that you can never be sure with whom you are communicating and that someone could steal your online identity and impersonate you!
The lesson elements in this module teach students about the privacy principle: “Identity is not guaranteed on the Internet”. They are designed to be independent and flexible, so you can incorporate them into any size lesson plan. Student resources are available at https://teachingprivacy.org/identity-isnt-guaranteed/.
Summary of Learning Objectives: Students can explain why it is difficult to be sure who one is communicating with online; students can investigate and evaluate the legitimacy of services that want their personal information.
As our students create more and more digital products—blog posts, videos, podcasts, e-books—they should be using images to enhance them. Images grab an audience’s attention, they can illustrate key concepts, set a certain tone, and present a more complete understanding of the ideas you’re putting out there.
And the internet is absolutely teeming with images students can grab and use in a matter of seconds. But in most cases, they SHOULD NOT GRAB. Despite the fact that these images are easy to get, using them may be illegal.
Use the information in this blog post to teach students to either create their own images or legally use images found online, including proper citation.
In this lesson, students will discuss computer forensics and complete an activity in which they will process an electronic crime scene. Students will understand how computers and other electronic data storage devices leave the footprints and data trails of their users.
This lesson sets the stage for why we want to learn about how the Internet works. First, students share what they currently know about how the Internet works through a KWL activity. Then, students watch a short video that introduces Vint Cerf and the Internet at a high level. Students skim a memo written to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) by Vint Cerf in 2002 entitled “The Internet is for Everyone”, which calls out a series of threats to the prospect that the Internet should be an open, easily and cheaply accessible resource for everyone on the planet. Finally, we foreshadow the practice of PT at the end of the unit. Many of the questions and challenges raised by Vint Cerf still apply today, and students will be asked to research and present on one for the Practice PT.
The purpose of this lesson is to set up and motivate students to be receptive to learning about some of the technical aspects of how the Internet functions. We want the message to be clear that a huge part of being able to solve these problems, or even to function as an informed citizen, is to be educated about how the Internet actually works as a system that is built, engineered, and maintained by people.
It is both interesting and important to know that the protocols or rules by which Internet traffic is governed are not owned or controlled by any government or business (at the moment). It’s a group of well-meaning citizen-engineers dedicated to keeping the Internet free, open and robust for all.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is the group of mostly volunteer citizens that proposes and develops all of the standards and protocols that exist on the Internet. Request for Comments (RFC) documents, like the one we use in the lesson, is how these standards and protocols are defined and published for all to see on the IETF website. They are some of the best-written technical documents in existence.
And with a little background in how bits work, what’s necessary for protocols to work when bits are transferred over wires, they are relatively accessible reading. Here’s the full set: https://www.ietf.org/rfc.html. RFC 000 (the first one) is related to what we ask students to do in the next several lessons.
Students will be able to:- connect a personal experience to one challenge related to the idea that "The Internet is for Everyone".- cite one example of how computing has a global effect -- both beneficial and harmful -- on people and society.- explain that the Internet is a distributed global system that works on shared and open protocols.
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This lesson is a capstone to the Internet unit. Students will research and prepare a flash talk about an issue facing society: either Net Neutrality or Internet Censorship. Developing an informed opinion about these issues hinges on an understanding of how the Internet functions as a system. Students will prepare and deliver a flash talk that should combine forming an opinion about the issue and an exhibition of their knowledge of the internet.
This lesson is good practice for certain elements of the AP Explore Performance Task. The primary things practiced here are: doing a bit of research about impacts of computing (though here it’s specifically about the Internet), explaining some technical details related to ideas in computer science, and connecting these ideas to global and social impacts. Students will practice synthesizing information, and presenting their learning in a flash talk.
Note: This is NOT the official AP® Performance Task that will be submitted as part of the Advanced Placement exam; it is a practice activity intended to prepare students for some portions of their individual performance at a later time.
This lesson has dual purposes of honing "rapid research" skills and tying a temporary bow on the Internet Unit.
The act of doing "rapid research" is one that will come up over and over again in this course. We want to build students' confidence and skills in researching topic using a variety of sources. In the case of this lesson we want students to read articles on the issues but scan for the terms and vocabulary they know like: IP, DNS, HTTP, routing, packets, scaling, redundancy, and reliability. We want students to be able to explain with some level of technical proficiency how these things work as well as the potential beneficial and harmful effects.
Net Neutrality and Internet Censorship are related issues having to do with organizations attempting to control internet traffic for a variety of reasons. There are many other large societal issues and dilemmas related to the Internet besides these that like: big data, surveillance, security, and encryption. We address these issues in Unit 4: Big Data and Privacy. For this practice PT, we want to keep the focus on issues that relate more directly to the systems and protocols
Students will be able to:- research a global impact of the Internet.- create and present a flash talk on a global impact of the Internet.- analyze the relationship of an Internet technology to the impact.
