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April 20, 2006
Creating a Samizdat Bloggers Network Using SMS Text Messaging
Given all that's been written over the last few days about education bloggers being censored unnecessarily by school Internet filters, I'm beginning to wonder if it's time for a group of us to create a samizdat bloggers network.
Samizdat? Gesundheit.
Samizdat (самиздат) is a Russian word that essentially translates to "self publishing." During the Cold War, Russian free speech advocates created a samizdat network to disseminate government -censored information secretly to the public. Using techniques as basic as carbon paper, handwritten notes and crudely copied video tapes, the samizdat network allowed advocates of free speech and democracy to share their ideas under the radar of authorities. Similar techniques have been used in countries like Poland, the former Czechoslovakia, Iran and China to spread knowledge without government interference.
Today, we're finding ourselves in a situation where professional educators are being stifled and stymied by Internet filters installed in such a way that makes it impossible for all of us to use tools like blogging to share best practices and debate controversial issues. No other profession would tolerate having such a blunt instrument quashing professional discourse. Educators shouldn't tolerate it either.
On the one hand, I think there needs to be a broader public debate about the role of schools in controlling knowledge, restricting access for both students and teachers. As Will Richardson writes,
It may mean spending less time blogging and more time writing for print beyond the usual list of publications where the ideas may find a different audience. And it may mean being subversive. But I think it's crucial that we think hard about ways of bringing these ideas to the people who exert the most control over what happens in our classrooms, and that's not always the people inside the school building.
These types of public debates rarely begin overnight. It will take a lot of hard work: writing op-eds, inspiring journalists to cover the story, generating debate at real-world gatherings of educators, perhaps even complaining to our representatives in Congress. In the mean time, too many educators are stuck without access to important online materials - which brings me back to the idea of creating a blogger samizdat network.
The first step would be to create a brand new website that aggregates a group of education blogs that are being censored. For example, you could take the RSS feed of Miguel Guhlin's blog, my site, Will Richardson's, etc, and use a free RSS digest tool like Feeddigest to display them on another website. Feeddigest blends the RSS feeds together as if they were all being produced by the same blog, then lets you post them by adding a javascript to a website. Take a look at my site WSISBlogs.org and you'll see Feeddigest in action, displaying content from over two dozen blogs from around the world.
Ideally, what you would want to do is create a new website and buy a new domain name for it, so it would be unfamiliar to a school's Web filter. This wouldn't solve the Mysp@ce dilemma, though, in which filters block websites based on keywords on a site. That might take a bit of geekery to program a word scrubber that examines the RSS feeds, replaces blocked words with innocuous versions of them, then generates a new RSS feed that goes into the digest. But that's beyond my personal skill set. As long as a website is being blocked at the URL level rather than a keyword level, setting up a new website with a digest of blogs would work - for a little while, at least.
At some point, though, the technocrats who manage the web filter might end up catching on to the new website and start blocking it. First, you'd have to move the website again, with a new IP address and a new domain name. You'd then need a system in place that could notify supporters of the website that the site had moved elsewhere. Normally, an email list could serve this purpose, but some districts block access to list management tools like Yahoogroups, making it difficult for educators to receive emails from such a list.
This is where it gets interesting. Rather than use email to receive notifications of the site moving elsewhere, I'd use mobile phone text messaging instead. The vast majority of mobile phones today allow users to send and receive SMS text messages - short bursts of information that are transmitted over the phone network. I've been thinking a lot about SMS ever since the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami, when Taran Rampersad and others began experimenting with a relay system that would allow SMS messages to be sent to groups of first-responders involved in recovery efforts.
How does SMS fit into blogs and censorship? Schools may filter websites and email but as far as I know they haven't started filtering text messages. And as it turns out, it's not very difficult to set up your own SMS relay network that would distribute text messages to large groups of people. Last night, I got it to work using two free tools: Google Groups and TeleFlip.
Google Groups is one of the most popular email list hosting sites. Countless people use it to create their own discussion groups in which people subscribe their email address, sending and receiving messages to all other subscribers. Typically, subscribers receive messages the old-fashioned way - via email. But what's stopping us from using it to send messages to our mobile phones instead?
I'm not talking about mobile phones that have email capabilities. I'm taking about SMS. This is where TeleFlip comes in. TeleFlip is a cool service that lets you send emails to someone's phone via SMS using a very simple protocol. (It only works in the United States and Canada, though.) For example, let's say your mobile phone number is 555-888-2222. Teleflip acts as an email-to-SMS gateway so anyone can email you and have it appear as a text message on your phone. All you have to do is take the phone number and have that serve as the name of the email address, with teleflip.com as the domain name. So in the case of the telephone number 555-888-2222, you would send a short email to 5558882222 @ teleflip . com, and Teleflip will route your email to that phone's SMS account. Give it a try with your own mobile phone and see if it works. I was pleasantly surprised how fast it works. It probably will for you, too - though don't send anything that looks like spam because they're very sensitive about that sort of thing.
With tools like Teleflip, any mobile phone with SMS text messaging can receive short emails. In fact, it's quite possible your phone already lets you send and receive emails through SMS, even without Teleflip: for example, Cingular Wireless customers can get emails if they're sent to your phone number plus the domain "mmode.com." So if 555-888-2222 were a Cingular phone, you could send email to it by posting to 15558882222@mmode.com - just don't forget the number 1 at the beginning. Verizon, T-Mobile and other carriers have similar services. With Teleflip, though, you don't need to know which service a person subscribes to; as long as you've got their phone number, you can send an email to them as SMS.
So let's say you wanted to set up that samizdat bloggers network. First, you'd create a new group on Google Groups. Then you would invite people to subscribe to it. Users could either send you their phone numbers and you could subscribe them manually, using the Teleflip version of their phone numbers as their subscription address. Or they could go to the group's homepage and subscribe themselves. Either way, they would then get a confirmation message from Google Groups via SMS. By replying to that SMS, your subscription is then confirmed.
At this point, you'll now have an email list where the subscribers are actually mobile phones with SMS. As manager of the samizdate network, if it becomes necessary to move the blogs to a new URL, all you have to do is notify everyone by emailing the new URL to the Google Group. The message would then be sent as an SMS to all of your subscribers, bypassing the school's email system. That way, they would all get the warning that the website was moving to a new URL, without having the URL getting sent out through the school's email network.
Of course, this simple technique could be used in all sorts of other circumstances. It's sort of a crude version of the SMS relay network that Taran Rampersad and other bloggers talked about. So a group of first-responders, protesters, volunteers, etc, going into a situation where email access is impossible, a Google/Teleflip SMS relay might make a lot of sense - that is, unless Teleflip decides it's taking up too much of their bandwidth and shuts everyone down. Thankfully, though, there are lots of open source SMS tools being created, some of which might do exactly the same sort of thing, installable on your own server.
So perhaps with a little help from SMS and RSS digest tools, educators united in solidarność might be able to achieve their own form of online glasnost. Now wouldn't that be revolutionary? Da. -andy
Posted by acarvin at April 20, 2006 1:59 PM
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