The LTD Project Blog

Spring office cleaning and a computer change-over are leading to a host of re-discoveries, reflections, retrievals, and restorations. Many old sticky notes, some not originally yellow, have surfaced from the sea of dust accumulated over years of good intentions. This reflection is about copyright, stemming on a final tiny, dog-eared leaf from an old sticky pad about EdTechTalk#25 (2005.11.13).

A suggestion I jotted down when I first encountered that chat reads, “Teach Ss to copyright [their] own stuff.” The note on the back of that tiny leaf suggests, “[T]eachers need not be techies” (no date).

As I searched to retrieve a reference to substantiate the stimulus for those brief notes, I discovered a recent, yet related comment in the EdTechTalk blog sidebar entitled Teaching about Copyright and Fair Use (Renee Hobbs, on Teachers Teaching Teachers #135, 2009.03.02).

Renee points out two more links to explore: one for educators interested in exploring fair use, and the other to videos introducing intellectual property rights issues to educators and learners:

1. Code of Best Practices … (Temple University, School of Communication and Theater, 2008.11.00), and
2. Music Videos Help … (Temple University, School of Communication and Theater, 2009.05.23).

In a recent email announcement, Educause provides links to collections of IP-related resources:

• Intellectual Property
  • Copyright
  • Fair Use

(Tune In Feb. 1: Copyright Fair Use and the Economy,

January 24, 2008, 21:45:16 JST)

This is a quick post to save today’s finds until I reassemble IP resources on a wiki. For previous posts on IP issues, I suggest browsing the LTD Project Blog category “IntellectualProperty”. You may find the links to the same resource collections in an earlier post.

This post is a follow-on to Food for Thought, e-Cobblers, a question about learning objects, or “fungible digital parts,” an import from pab’s potpourri (2007.07.30).

With reference to Susan Metos (2005), who defines a learning object as a “digital resource” that “include[s] or link[s] to (1) a learning objective, (2) a practice activity, and (3) an assessment,” Brian Lamb explains the demise of learning objects:

With only the noblest of intentions, proponents of learning objects (and I was one of them) went at the problem of promoting reuse by establishing an arduous and complex set of interoperability standards and then working to persuade others to adopt those standards. Educators were asked to take on complex and ill-defined tasks in exchange for an uncertain payoff. Not surprisingly, almost all of them passed.

(Lamb, 2007, Dr. Mashup…)

References

Lamb, Brian. (2007). Dr. Mashup; or, Why Educators Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Remix. EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 42, no. 4 (July/August 2007), 12-25. Retrieved September 3, 2007, from http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm07/erm0740.asp?bhcp=1

• companion audio mashup (UBCWiki)

Metos, Susan E. (2005). Learning Objects: A Rose by Any Other Name…. EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 40, no. 4 (July/August 2005), 12–13. Retrieved September 3, 2007, from http://www.educause.edu/er/erm05/erm05410.asp

Blogged with Flock

In a Blogging for Beginners workshop that started in January 2007, I came across a catchy, interactive presentation of copyright information that I’d like to share with you HERE.

That little gem is nested in an Adventures of CyberBee page more for grown-ups, Copyright with Cyberbee, that lists a number of other resources and offers a lesson plan to explore.

For a rather more staid catalog of intellectual property (IP) references, please check out IP Related Resources and precursor posts in pab’s potpourri.

An announcement of a live Educause event February 15 reminds me to follow up on some older intellectual property (IP) related resources. Here are a few more gleaned through the announcement – two out of three with a U.S. bent:

Educause. (2007). Federal copyright law [online resource collection]. Retrieved February 7, 2007, from http://www.educause.edu/Browse/645?PARENT_ID=252

Educause. (2007). Scholarly communication [online resource collection]. Retrieved February 7, 2007, from http://www.educause.edu/Browse/645?PARENT_ID=428

Public Knowledge. (2007). Policy blog: intellectual property. Retrieved February 7, 2007, from http://www.publicknowledge.org/articles/49

• “Public Knowledge is a Washington DC based advocacy group working to defend your rights in the emerging digital culture” (Public Knowledge, 2007).
• Gigi Sohn, President & Founder of Public Knowledge, is to be a special guest at that live Educause event: “The Information Commons and the Future of Innovation, Scholarship, and Creativity.”

Whilst scouting neighboring tribes in the blogosphere, I found a blog among MaryH’s listings called Learning with Computers [LwC]: A community blog for the Learning with Computers Yahoo! Group.

What first caught my eye on that blog were a couple definitions posted there by one of MaryH’s blog mates, which distinguish two different purposes of blogs:

The Filter Style Blog vs The Journal Style Blog (July 28, 2006).

In retrospective, those definitions makes this blog sound like a combination of both styles, a combination which I hope the blog title “potpourri” accurately reflects.

Although the LwC blog apparently has gone into hybernation (since October 2006), a comment linked to the filter vs. journal definitions (above) points out a typical filter blog that is still up and running, namely: The Generator Blog

Looks like some of the generators filtering through there are worth checking out. Two more generators have shown up since I started this blog entry!

If you’re interested in exploring intellectual property rights in some breadth, if not depth, below are a few more pointers to round out those in a previous post about Aussie copyright concerns. These are from three collections:

1. A working bibliography on disk (entries lacking annotations, for resources currently accessible):

Downes, Stephen. (2003). Copyright, ethics and theft. Journal of the United States Distance Learning Association 17(2), 51-62. Retrieved January 31, 2007, from http://www.usdla.org/html/journal/ED_APR03.pdf

Downes, Stephen. (2006). A Patent Dilemma. Innovate 3(2). Retrieved January 31, 2007, from http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=399

Lessig, Lawrence. (2002). Free culture [Flash media recording]. Retrieved January 31, 2007, from http://randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/free.html

2. Bookmarks on del.icio.us (not necessarily annotated, either):

http://del.icio.us/pab/copyright

3. Another place I’d look, Educause.

If you discover any articles at Educause (or elsewhere) that you find particularly easy to understand and applicable to our work (educational blogging), please don’t hesitate to say which and why in a comment related to each.

The message extracts below pose some hard questions about copyright laws that I wrote in reaction to the 08 Nov. Internet Industry Association (IIA) news release cited in the message. I got a pointer to the news release from the Teach and Learn Online Google Group.

New Copyright Laws Risk Criminalising Everyday Australians [news release]…

That article quotes Peter Coroneos, Chief Executive of the Internet Industry Association (IIA) saying, “The US Free Trade Agreement does not require Australia to go down this [onerous] path, and neither US nor European law contain such far reaching measures” [as the Australian parliament enacted].

Is that [the IIA's] assessment of current U.S. law accurate?

The risk scenarios here [on the IIA website] are quite illuminating….

Do you think the U.S. Congress will follow suit? [What about other countries?]

Cheers, Paul

PS: Here is a related podcast, if you’re interested, … [in which Brian Fitzgerald interviews the IIA's chief executive].

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