This short notice in The Chronicle of Higher Education's Daily Report caught my attention last week, and I’m very glad it did.
January 23, 2008
Open-Access Activists Publish Declaration
The founders of Wikipedia and Connexions, an open-access source for educational material, revealed their Cape Town Open Education Declaration in the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday.
The declaration grew out of a September 2007 meeting to spur the open-education movement. The goal is to create more educational resources that anyone can freely access and contribute to. Members of the Open Society Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation, which support education, attended the September meeting.
Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) and Rich Baraniuk (Connexions) write that open education “promises to turn the textbook-production pipeline into a vast dynamic ecosystem that is in a constant state of creation, use, reuse, and improvement.” —Hurley Goodall
The opening paragraph of the Capetown Delcaration is promising and exciting:
“We are on the cusp of a global revolution in teaching and learning. Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. They are also planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go.”
After reading the declaration, I realize that I am woefully unaware of the growing pool of open educational resources. But I intend to become a proactive learner and discover more about how I can integrate the practice of creating and using open resources in my own classroom. It’s an exciting notion.
Click here to read the entire declaration and follow the related links, and here is a link to the FAQs.
See Mark Shuttleworth as he introduces the Cape Town Open Education Declaration:
Monday, January 28, 2008
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Flying Without a Safety Net(work)
On weekends, I rely heavily on the Trinity network to check email from students and colleagues, and even (gasp) to get some work done for our Computer Skills class. Imagine my surprise, which quickly turned to panic, when I logged on to the network Saturday morning and found that my account was “no longer valid and has expired.” Nothing helped, not retyping my password, not using the Trinity webmail exchange. I wrote the HelpDesk, even though I knew it was closed. Monday was a holiday, and my next class was 8:30 Tuesday morning.
I drove over to a virtually deserted campus to try to log in from my office computer. No luck. I was still “expired.” So I took a quick look at the class syllabus to see what advice I had for my students who found themselves in a similar situation:
What if the Computer Network is down?
Plan to complete assignments before they are due. Unforeseen computer problems sometimes occur. Due dates will be changed if the server is down for a significant period of time. Due dates will not be changed for personal computer problems.
What if you don't have a computer or your personal computer isn't working?Computers are available for you to use in many locations on campus. Anticipate problems and complete your work well before deadlines.
Fortunately, I had completed most of my notes for the Tuesday class in advance – taking my own advice about completing work before it is due was a good thing - but I was still out of touch with my students. What if they needed me? How would they survive?
Well, or course, I underestimated their self-reliance and overestimated my own importance. When Heather from the HelpDesk blessedly fixed the problem Sunday afternoon, I had exactly two messages from students, both friendly and neither urgent – my students were just fine.
But the experience made me thing about terms such as Internet Dependence.
I turned to – where else, the Internet – and checked out Dr. Sanity’s Blog to test myself. Did I exhibit any of the following symptoms of withdrawal from my network??
Withdrawal, as manifested by two or more of the following occurring after cessation or reduction of heavy prolonged internet browsing:
(a) autonomic hyperactivity such as sweating or heart rate in excess of 100 beats per minute
(b) hand tremor and an intense desire to type rants
(c) nausea or vomiting when re-entering the real world from the virtual
(d) transient visual, auditory, or tactile hallucinations
(e) psychomotor agitation
(f) anxiety that something will happen and YOU WON'T KNOW ABOUT IT!
(g) grand mal seizures or perhaps just tics as you longingly look toward the shut-off computer
Whew! So far so good (well, maybe I did experience a bit of Symptom F), but I did “re-learn” two big lessons from flying without my safety network:
· Get the work done in advance. You never know when you’ll be cut off from your network. If it happens, relax, go to a movie, enjoy the weekend knowing that you’re ready for class
· Your students are more resourceful than you think – and the best thing you can teach them is how to get answers for themselves!
Monday, January 14, 2008
Academic Blogging?
A short article in today's Chronicle of Higher Education caught my eye this morning, particularly since I'm thinking about ways to make my students' blogs meaningful to them and to the things they will be learning in our Computer Skills class. The title of the article was Blogs Are Increasingly Venues for Scholarship, Librarians Are Told. It's fascinating to follow the links in the article and read some of the discussion and academic arguments the entry in question produced.
I don't pretend to understand specialized botanical comments such as "I think my main point is that the authors need to have considered more complex (i.e. realistic) evolutionary genetic situations before they proposed an alternative method of molecular heredity. I think the most important data that is missing is the actual biochemical function of the hothead gene. Knowing that would really help to figure out what is occurring in the double nulls." However, the spirit of academic give-and-take is lively and fun to read. Some commenters can't resist correcting spelling errors, and one in particular has strong feelings about a certain journal:
The papers that are published by bigshots that are completely crap (I’m thinking about a particular journal family- one can guess) are the ones that bug me the most.
Blogs seem to have the potential to provide an informed yet informal forum for academicians and students of all fields and generations. Here's what Carlton Clark of Collin County Community College has to say.
"By reading and occasionally commenting on my students' blogs and by making mine available to them, I hope to establish a greater rapport with my students. I can establish a dialogue or sense of trust, which I would expect to carry over into the classroom. Although my teaching philosophy statement contains a few sentences on the importance of developing a sense of rapport with my students, I've found that, in practice, establishing this rapport has always been a great personal challenge."
His comments and more on the topic of academic blogging can be found at Lore: An E-Journal for Teachers of Writing.
I am excited about a new semester and new blogs that allow us to share our thoughts and ideas in an academic, but nevertheless, fun and creative setting.
I don't pretend to understand specialized botanical comments such as "I think my main point is that the authors need to have considered more complex (i.e. realistic) evolutionary genetic situations before they proposed an alternative method of molecular heredity. I think the most important data that is missing is the actual biochemical function of the hothead gene. Knowing that would really help to figure out what is occurring in the double nulls." However, the spirit of academic give-and-take is lively and fun to read. Some commenters can't resist correcting spelling errors, and one in particular has strong feelings about a certain journal:
The papers that are published by bigshots that are completely crap (I’m thinking about a particular journal family- one can guess) are the ones that bug me the most.
Blogs seem to have the potential to provide an informed yet informal forum for academicians and students of all fields and generations. Here's what Carlton Clark of Collin County Community College has to say.
"By reading and occasionally commenting on my students' blogs and by making mine available to them, I hope to establish a greater rapport with my students. I can establish a dialogue or sense of trust, which I would expect to carry over into the classroom. Although my teaching philosophy statement contains a few sentences on the importance of developing a sense of rapport with my students, I've found that, in practice, establishing this rapport has always been a great personal challenge."
His comments and more on the topic of academic blogging can be found at Lore: An E-Journal for Teachers of Writing.
I am excited about a new semester and new blogs that allow us to share our thoughts and ideas in an academic, but nevertheless, fun and creative setting.
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
Remix Culture?
I recently completed a design project for a client that included stills from classic films, and I thought a lot about copyright issues regarding photos of iconic film stars and movie set photographs. It’s complicated. One of the new sites I found, The Center for Social Media at American University, explores some of these new concerns, specifically the Fair Use aspects of “transformative” treatments of copyright material. Here is a short description of their findings:
“The study, Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video, by Center director Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, co-director of the law school’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, shows that many uses of copyrighted material in today’s online videos are eligible for fair use consideration. The study points to a wide variety of practices—satire, parody, negative and positive commentary, discussion-triggers, illustration, diaries, archiving and of course, pastiche or collage (remixes and mashups)—all of which could be legal in some circumstances.”
The most entertaining part of the report is a wild, funny and thoughtful list of videos in each of the “gray” categories. My personal favorite so far is Evolution of Dance, but there is so much original splicing and cutting and reuse in each of the examples, and each of them may or may not fit in the category of Fair Use. At the end of this page is a video with further videos that are designed to generate discussion and debate.
There is much creativity in the user generated space, and much of it builds on unauthorized uses of copyrighted material. In this new era of participatory media, where should the line be drawn between infringement and fair use?
“The study, Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video, by Center director Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, co-director of the law school’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, shows that many uses of copyrighted material in today’s online videos are eligible for fair use consideration. The study points to a wide variety of practices—satire, parody, negative and positive commentary, discussion-triggers, illustration, diaries, archiving and of course, pastiche or collage (remixes and mashups)—all of which could be legal in some circumstances.”
The most entertaining part of the report is a wild, funny and thoughtful list of videos in each of the “gray” categories. My personal favorite so far is Evolution of Dance, but there is so much original splicing and cutting and reuse in each of the examples, and each of them may or may not fit in the category of Fair Use. At the end of this page is a video with further videos that are designed to generate discussion and debate.
There is much creativity in the user generated space, and much of it builds on unauthorized uses of copyrighted material. In this new era of participatory media, where should the line be drawn between infringement and fair use?
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