I recently learned about Tor, which is free software distributed by EFF permitting users to circumvent traffic monitoring software and other content blocking software on networks. Personally, I often teach at schools where different sites are blocked, sometimes even Google! I can see this being a very handy tool that could let me show some websites to other teachers that might be otherwise inaccessible. I am also thinking it could be handy to utilize my instant messaging software programs, even if those programs are blocked on that local network. I am thinking that school district IT folks will find a way to circumvent this, but I have not heard of them doing it yet. I am guessing that relatively few people in the education space (at least K-12) are using Tor. It would be interesting to know how many university students are using it. I am not sure but I do not think there is huge awareness at this point for why software like this could be useful.

I am interested to know if using Tor is just as effective as using a free VPN solution like Hamachi for protecting your passwords and identity when you're using a public WiFi connection. There are plenty of legitimate uses of Tor I can think of, but also many that are not. It will be interesting to see if it is even possible to videoconference through Tor on a school network that is setup to typically block those types of connections. I would suspect that the program would throttle down available bandwidth to the point where videoconferencing would not be practical, but that may not be the case. I will hopefully get to test this in upcoming months as I travel around doing different workshops for teachers in schools.