You might have heard that there is a significant election coming up and that means a blizzard of AWESOME political advertisements.  I am sure that it will be even MORE AWESOME due to the Citizen’s United decision, but I digress.

That said, I received an uncomfortable preview tonight on what might be coming up as more and more websites need to turn to more and more aggressive advertising to support their free services.  I was moving through my nightly RSS feeds and stumbled across this ad, which was sitting in the RSS feed of a popular educational technology blog:

This is not a political blog, so, I am not going to comment on Mr. Paul or Right-to-Work movements, but, this is clearly propaganda and an attempts at a grassroots (or astroturf?) campaign against unions.

I am reminded of the hub-bub over the Calculus teacher that sold spots on his math test to help pay for the paper to print the tests on.

There is a debate somewhere here about the appropriateness of supporting advertising to support any public educational pursuit.  But, I think we do need to pause for a moment and consider… when we use all of these amazing free tools, what, exactly, are we exposing our students to?  It is certainly one thing if we are advertising Coco Puffs, Fords or Barbies, but what about Obama, McCain, pro this or anti that?

I am not saying don’t use, but, I think it is something to think about.

Just a thought…