It's been fun watching the spin doctors throw dirt on George Bush's casket. I watched the coverage on PBS, but evidently the coverage on C-SPAN, which showed a split view with both candidates continuously, let the viewer see George Bush squirm and pout. Indeed someone has made a 
Faces of Frustration video that shows how George Bush during the debate. I'm loving every minute of it.
I've made progress in writing my speech for Okemo. It still needs something. On the one hand, I want it to stay relatively short -- no more than 5 minutes. On the other hand, I feel like its still a bit thin. I should probably find some way to work in comments about the election or about the war or about UEA or something. I'm not good at subtext.
Toward the end of the summer, I mentioned that Buzz and I were forced to lock down the student products in our class. At the time I wrote a response, but I didn't post it then. I thought I whould post it now.
Buzz and I have discussed making the student-created materials in our course private. Although we have strong reservations about doing so, we have configured Tikiwiki to disallow public access and have removed the mailing list archive.
We think allowing public access to course materials is the right idea from a common-sense standpoint. We don't lock the door to our classrooms when we go in to teach. We don't check people's IDs at the door. If a member of the public came into our classrooms while we were teaching (or stood outside the door listening), we would be unlikely to chase them away. We believe that what happens in a public university class is a public activity.
We think allowing public access to course materials is a good idea from a philosophical standpoint. Buzz and I work at public institutions of higher education and therefore consider ourselves public servants. Because the taxpayers support our endeavors, we believe that they are entitled to observe/use the fruits of our labors. Therefore, we are philosophically opposed to excluding anyone from reading or using materials that we develop online. Buzz developed a web site on human symmetry/allometry several years ago that is now listed in the National Science Teachers Association national database SciLinks. The URL for that site shows up in high school biology textbooks so that teachers and students can access the data he has posted. If he followed the exclusionary model, students would not have access to a rich database that allows inquiries-based problem solving.
We believe that allowing public access to course materials is a good idea from a pedagogical standpoint. When work can be easily shared with friends and colleagues, students develop an increased sense of pride and interest in what they're producing. When the work is externalised, people see the work as more valuable and important: it becomes not a purely academic exercise, but a contribution to a universe of resources. My experience has been that students generally produce better quality work under these conditions and take a greater sense of ownership of the results.
Making works available publicly is not only a good idea -- we believe that restricting works from the public is a bad idea. It is a bad idea for a variety of reasons, but most importantly because it provides a false sense of security that materials posted can't be exposed.
When I was a graduate student, before the Internet was a household word, I learned that pretty much anything you write on-line can show up unexpectedly, out-of-context, months or weeks after you write it. The lesson I took from that was to be thoughtful about what I wrote on-line and to try to make sure that the context was always available, so it would be hard for someone to take something out of context and present it in isolation. Even when something is intended to be private, it is far too easy, in today's electronic climate, for a message to "escape". Here is an article about what happened when Laurie Garrett, a well-known and respected journalist, wrote a personal email about the Davos World Economic Forum a few years ago and her message got forwarded to someone who forwarded it to someone else and it ended up at Metafilter
By asking our students to externalize their work, we're asking them to recognize that in an age of electronic communications, anything they can write can be so easily shared that it's an illusion to believe that what they write could not end up in front of their principal or the parents of the students in their classes. Anything they write could be shared by other students, faculty, TAS, or through insecurities in the operating system or other software packages. If you understand ahead of time that this is true, you are much less likely to be surprised if/when it happens. And you're much less likely to write something that you will regret later on.
All that said, over our strong objections, we have configured tikiwiki to restrict access to registered users only and we have removed the mailing-list archive, as per your requirement.
At our "hearing", there was some talk about having a real conversation about the issue, but it hasn't happened.