Blog Juice for Educational Technology

I stumbled on this posting from the Creative Commons weblog last week and thought it might be interesting to those of you following the rhetoric of the P2P debate represented in John Logie’s article in First Monday. Magnatune, who has been trying for quite a while to build a model of music distribution and sales around allowing others to download and sample tracks from their albums, is explaining now Why we are Not Evil !

Of course Magnatune is not providing music for file sharing across P2P (although they do encourage you to copy any purchased albums to share with “up to 3 of your friends”), but this seems tangentially related enough, a response to piracy and the aggressive actions of the RIAA. Then there’s the USA Today piece about Magnatune provided for download on their website whose title positions them as one of the good guys, too: Apple’s iTunes Might Not Be Only Answer to Ending Piracy. What’s interesting to me is that Magnatune is trying to find a place of non-evil which is outside of the typical polarized positions that Logie talks about, yet is again polarizing by using an opposite binary term.

Call for Papers: Composition and Copyright (edited collection)

Eds. Steve Westbrook, Ph.D. & Timothy Hodge, Esq.

We are seeking 500-word proposals for an interdisciplinary collection of articles that examines the relationship between copyright law and the activities of writing, researching, teaching, and learning. Regardless of the particular activity or combination of activities under discussion, we are concerned primarily with the legal, questionably legal, and illegal production and distribution of texts, which we define broadly to include verbal, print, auditory, visual, and new media, as well as computer code.

This is probably a silly question, but I was wondering whether what the legal implications are regarding the use of videogame characters on a site banner. For example, Game Pro has several well-known game avatars on its banner page, yet I don’t see any notices declaring that they received permission to use them. The problem is that I’d like to do something like this for another website dedicated to retro and modern gaming. I’m seeing sort of a collage with Pac-Man and more modern characters. Would we be likely to receive a C&D from some company if we did this?

Inside Higher Ed has an essay by Tarleton Gillespie — “Between What’s Right and What’s Easy” (http://insidehighered.com/views/2005/10/21/gillespie) — which argues that technologies such as the Copyright Clearance Center’s new plugin for Blackboard (and soon, with the merger, WebCT as well most likely) that is designed to ease the ability to seek permission for using materials and content in one’s course are a bad idea.

He writes:

Sometimes our tools are our politics, and that’s not always a good thing.
. . .
Even if the Blackboard mechanism allows instructors simply not to send their information to CCC for clearance (and it is unclear if it is, or eventually could become, a compulsory mechanism), the simple fact that clearance is becoming a technical default means that more and more instructors will default to it rather than invoking fair use.

1. Write a craptacular draft full of factual errors, incredible sources, and grammatical/mechanical mistakes.
2. Post it to Wikipedia.
3. Wait a few days and let the community clean it up for you.
4. Turn it in!

The open source development model at work, so the article says. Maybe something we can address in the Caucus come March.

Via Lifehacker.

Recent discussion and analysis of the current fair use dispute over the Google Print Library Project argues that Google’s rights to scan in printed texts is no different than the rights that search engines have to scan and cache the web. See

• Legal Experts Say Google Library Digitization Project Likely OK; Will It Revolve Around Snippets?
• Courts Unlikely To Stop Google Book Copying
• The Google Print Library Project: A Copyright Analysis

Adrian K. Ho and Charles W. Bailey, Jr. have made available online a pre-print of their article“Open Access Webliography” (Reference Services Review 33.3 (2005): 346-364).

From the abstract:

The paper aims to present a wide range of useful freely available internet resources (e.g. directories, e-journals, FAQs, mailing lists, and weblogs) that allow the reader to investigate the major aspects of the important open access (OA) movement. Design/methodology/approach - The internet resources included in this webliography were identified during the course of one of the authors writing the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-prints and Open Access Journals. The authors evaluated, selected, categorized, and annotated these resources to construct this webliography, which complements the bibliography. Findings - The most useful resources have been annotated and organized into webliography sections. For example, the “Starting Points”, “Debates”, and “General Information” sections list resources that orient the reader to OA and the issues involved. The different “Directories (and Guides)” sections alert the reader to useful finding aids on relevant subjects. Originality/value - This webliography provides easy access to the most relevant internet resources for understanding and practicing OA. It affirms the significance of OA in scholarly communication, and it identifies the key parties involved in and/or contributing to the OA movement.

Via Infocult, the kickoff of Academic Commons, which, as a combination discussion forum/quarterly journal, looks to be a very valuable resource. From the first edition page:

Academic Commons (http://www.academiccommons.org) offers a forum for investigating and defining the role that technology can play in liberal arts education. Sponsored by the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College (http://liberalarts.wabash.edu), Academic Commons publishes essays, reviews, interviews, showcases of innovative uses of technology, and vignettes that critically examine technology uses in the classroom. Academic Commons aims to share knowledge, develop collaborations, and evaluate and disseminate digital tools and innovative practices for teaching and learning with technology. We want this site to advance opportunities for collaborative design, open development, and rigorous peer critique of such resources.

Academic Commons also provides a forum for academic technology projects and groups (the Developer’s Kit) and a link to a new learning object referatory (LoLa). Our library archives all materials we have published and also provides links to allied organizations, mailing lists, blogs, and journals through a Professional Development Center.

The first issue of the quarterly looks very interesting. The pieces that pique my interest the most are these:

Technology & the Pseudo-Intimacy of the Classroom: an interview with University of Illinois-Chicago’s Jerry Graff

http://academiccommons.org/commons/interview/graff

Graff’s interest in “teaching the conflicts” as a way of rescuing higher education from itself has recently been replaced by a profound worry that higher ed is becoming increasingly irrelevant to American culture. We checked in to see what role Graff thinks technology might play in these unsettling times.

Copyright 101 by Richard Lanham, UCLA

http://academiccommons.org/commons/essay/lanham-copyright-101

The pervasiveness of digital media has so altered the nature of authorship and ownership that questions of intellectual property have become matters of core concern for our students and our contemporary culture. Lanham argues that these issues require an academic response, and that a basic course in copyright — “Copyright 101″ — represents a first step in this process.

Cross-posted to CultureCat and CCCC-IP.

I was wondering–does anyone know of any academic book publishers that are willing to publish their books under CC licenses? Have any publishers already done so? I’m aware, of course, that Lessig published his book Free Culture under a CC license with Penguin Press–but I’m not so sure they’d be willing to do that for anyone else–nor whether they’d be interested in an edited collection on wikis.

Any info or leads would be appreciated.

Maybe it’s been mentioned here before, but it’s news to me: The people behind the Writing Centers Research Project are making the full-text archives of The Writing Center Journal available to the public. Nice!

John C. Dvorak has a bit challenging Creative Commons for being an unnecessary middle layer between content producers and consumers:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1838244,00.asp