How Open is Your Open Content?

Posted on by Brian Hughes

Here’s an interesting discussion of open educational resources (OER): Framing the Open Conversation – Branded Content & Fair Use

Rolin, the author and Assistant Professor & Director of EdTech & Media at Seattle Pacific University, believes content should be remixable rather than merely accessible. (Rolin goes further to discuss “openwashing” of content, which offers an interesting comparison of content makers.) With decades of web content available, it’s helpful to keep this ideal of remix in mind when choosing or creating OER.

Free access to educational materials is important for many learners, but educators can potentially do more with content that does not foreclose possibilities of remix.

College Attorneys on Fair Use

Posted on by Brian Hughes

Some notes from attending the National Association of College and University Attorneys’ Copyright and Fair Use: Codes of Best Practice in Higher Education webinar.

Quotes from the webinar:

  • “For college’s, applying ‘fair use’ doctrine should be a case of risk management.”
  • “‘Fair Use’ is about gray areas. You should ask yourself: is it a gray area for the other side?” (in other words, would it actually provoke legal action?)
  • “A reason that fair use has flourished in education for images is because there is no copyright clearinghouse mechanism for images… but I think there will be.”
  • “The Copyright Clearance Center is not [a library’s] friend… they are out there trying to shrink the domain of legitimate fair use.”

Other fun:

  • “Artists are natural lawyers because they use a gray scale.”
  • “There is always a degree of ineliminable risk when invoking fair use.”

An irony of scholarly attribution

Posted on by Brian Hughes

I have been thinking about the academic honesty issues for a while now. So far my best ideas are in my draft essay, Challenges on the Horizon for Scholarly Attribution (another Knol experiment).

My interest in academic honesty came out of my exploration of the copyright wars, and my subsequent considerations of ownership in academic culture. Policies about scholarly attribution (acknowledgements, citation, and so on), for example, are the result of beliefs about the importance of acknowledging ownership of ideas – at once protecting authors’ livelihoods as well as allowing us to trace the history of an idea through multiple author’s works.

I have struggled to untangle these two goals not only to better understand the intention behind academic policies, but also their effects. My purpose is twofold: 1) to suggest that AHPs reveal a conflict between the scholarly and educational goals of academic culture, and 2) to show how limitations conceived by intellectuals under the sway of copyright law have a dramatic negative impact on educational opportunities.

From the abstract of my essay:

This essay explores how new tools demand that educators rethink the goals and effects of policies that prescribe originality in scholarship. The example of appropriation in art, and the conflict between appropriation and copyright law, will not only suggest how new tools can allow individuals to overcome limitations of policy to a productive end, but how we may value originality differently as a result of technological change.

An additional sidenote about my interest: those familiar with copyright law (and especially those who are critical of it) can appreciate the irony that academic honesty applies to ideas themselves – which is not the case with copyright. Thus, academics have seemingly gone one step further than so-called capitalists to protect themselves and their trade at the cost of individuals’ ability to freely “create culture.” This is perhaps my strongest motivation to continue to create an analysis of this urgent matter. I believe that the future of education depends on ending this embargo on unattributed intellectual production. (Which is not to say that attribution doesn’t have a proper role in education.)

Cheating is the pedagogy of the internet

Posted on by Brian Hughes

I ran across this fun and informative lecture by Jon Ippolito discussing various tensions between cultural production (in general) and the current culture of intellectual property law – where he introduces his idea that “cheating is the pedagogy of the internet.” It’s the written version of a lecture he gave at Columbia University a few years, when I was lucky enough to hear him. His ideas and criticisms about pedagogy and the internet led to his project called The Pool.

Watch and be introduced to other goodies such as:

I’ve been trying to take some of the ideas he touches on here and push them forward a bit. The law stuff is great, but perhaps it’s not the most accessible inroad to thinking about academic honesty. In lieu of that, I’m interested in what kind of conceptualization of education we would need to make room for new technologies that accelerate cheating. (Maybe it would turn out to be an approach to education we’ve always needed?)