So it was just paranoia...

No threat to my blog at all - simply a glitch. I've seen it several times since & often simply refreshing the page is all that's required to restore access. But it was an odd coincidence at the time & a reminder of how fragile our freedoms are.

While we agonize over the definition of "learning objects" (this week's course topic) & fret about the withdrawal of classroom access to blogs, there are still billions of the world's population who've never encountered a digital learning object, or had blog access in the first place to be removed.

This is five years old & unreferenced, but I suspect it isn't far from the truth:

Census of the Global Village
If we shrunk the world's population of six billion to a village of 100 people, it would contain:

• 70 would be nonwhite


• 70 would be non-Christian


• 11 would be gay


• 6 people would own 59% of the wealth and all 6 would be from the United States.


• 80 would live in poor housing conditions or not have a home at all


• 70 would be unable to read 50 would suffer from malnutrition


• 1 would be about to die


• 1 would be about to be born


• 1 would have a college education


• 2 would own computers.

From a report of the TechLearn conference, 2001.
Now that is something to worry about.