On the White House blog Tom Kalil and Aneesh Chopra are drawing attention to the role that students have in creating innovative online services that drive America forward. Noting the technologies and services as broad as Mosaic and Google that have come from students, they propose:

“an initiative that would cultivate, with student involvement, such a wave of innovation. Although it’s impossible to predict what the next generation of applications will be, universities, companies, and students could work together under such an initiative, which would serve as a sort of “Petri dish” where new ideas could incubate and grow.”

In our net neutrality FCC filing, the Board of SFC made similar points:

Network neutrality is also important to the United States as it struggles to emerge from the current recession and maintain its position as one of the world’s most innovative economies. The centrality of the Internet to students goes beyond the use of Twitter or MySpace. It even goes beyond the application of technology to learning and scholarship. Students can, and do, play an exciting role in American entrepreneurship. One need look no further than the enormously successful examples of Google and Facebook – innovative companies that came from the creativity and persistence of students who had access to a high-quality, open Internet. A transparent and non-discriminatory network removes barriers to entrepreneurs, be they students or otherwise.

Kalil and Chopra encourage students and others to write to broadband@ostp.gov to suggest ideas for how the broadband grant money should be spent.

What are your ideas for promoting student innovation?

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 25th, 2010 at 10:24 pm and is filed under Net Neutrality, The Movement, U.S.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.