When I first heard this I thought it must be a joke or I had fallen asleep and was in some weird dream, but then I woke up to find we are actually participating in a surrealistic Kafka fable. A JISCMail discussion list on VLEs has really been suspended because it, and others, are apparently perceived as a 'clear and present danger' to the results of the forthcoming UK election. To quote:
“All services provided by non-departmental public bodies (such as Becta) must comply with the General Election Guidance issued by the Cabinet Office.”
And lest we forget when the election is over here's a screenshot to remind us for posterity.
This type of nonsense needs to be challenged, so do send your comments to the list owner for onward transmission to those who formulate policies that are interpreted in such a rigid way. I would like to send this to the VLE@JISCMAIL.AC.UK, but I of course can't.
Ahh! … the law of unintended consequences.
I'm sure whoever drafted these Cabinent Office 'guidelines' (don't you just love that word) wasn't thinking about Virtual Learning Environments at the time. But what does this say about the ability of citizens to trust their government and quasi government agencies to be reliable and robust service providers if a body like BECTA can suspend free speech on topics completely unrelated to politics (at least they were until they did this) just because there's an election campaign underway?
I agree that BECTA et al need to keep out of politics but, sorry folks, this withdrawal of service was poorly conceived and is itself a highly political act which removed the rights of people to communicate via a service provided specifically for that purpose, and that is unjustified. I'm sure the politicians of all political hues will be happy to declare it's unjustified … won't they?
I do hope this was just a misjudgement. I know politicians and their acolytes like to believe they can control the message and that the internet is a bit difficult to control, but shutting down even a tiny part of the communications network like this is breathtakingly naive. The fact that this mailing list was 'owned' by BECTA should have been irrelevant, but unless they can change their position on this pretty quickly, perhaps we should be asking the question whether they should be the 'owners' of resources like this at all?
