Accidental Pedagogy

From the collection of really bad ideas: Posner on copyright

From Techcrunch. Appeals Court Judge Richard Posner in a blog post suggests that part of the
solution to the demise of newspapers and the readership and financial crunch they find themselves in is to change copyright laws to prohibit linking. Money quote:

"Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion."

I will try not to dwell on the two most obvious things:

a. we have in the past 15 years seen an enormous expansion of copyright law in favor of big content and

b. the sort of damage this will do to freedom of speech. academic freedom and the economic value generated by the Internet. The currency of the Internet is linking. Kill that and the Internet will slow down to the point that it likely wont be worth it. The simple act of writing this post would entail me first contacting and getting permission from Techcrunch and the Posner himself. Not to mention all the people I'm going to link to below. If I'm lucky in a year or more I'd have all my permissions lined and up and be ready to write and you could read it then zzzzzzzz

Something that struck me about Posner's argument is that he assumes a straight and uncomplicated switch from paid to free. I think that that really over-simplifies the issue. It is part of the story but there is also a question of convenience and added functionality. As one of the commenters points out a big part of the story of the declining profitability of papers comes from declining classifieds revenue. Sure the switch to Craigslist is partly because it's free but it is also easier to use, searchable and yes even fun. With news peoper I read more than ever before but mostly it is because of a larger meta-discussion about what the news is and I find that enormously engaging.

But I do have some sympathy with those trying to figure out how conventional news outlets can find a way into the future. When I read anything about the newspaper crisis I do think about higher ed. We face significant challenges in higher education in how we are going to change how we operate to cope with funding and changing students etc.

A little while back a couple of people on some mailing lists I'm on started making this same analogy - Lanny Arvan was one of those but there were others. They pointed to a interesting article on the newspaper crisis by Clay Shirky. In particular Shirky wrote.

Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away."

We see a lot of that I think in higher education. And part of the problem is that we land up with two polarized sides of the debate about our own future, neither of which is very helpful. On the one side there are those who say some version of "online universities are going to eat our lunch" and "everything must be online." And on the other side we have those who argue that we have nothing really to fear as MIT and Harvard aren't going to change and students will still want degrees from them. Well most people don't go to Harvard, they go to community colleges.

Another big part of the problem is that it often gets fought out in terms of technology but it is only very partially a technology issue. It is about accountability and evaluation and accreditation and leadership and the ability to effect change in higher ed.

The answer will come from somewhere in the middle ground between the two extremes. But I don't know what it is. And apparently neither do the newspaper people.

Using social networking in higher education

Alex Halavais  has a good post up about the use of Twitter by universities and colleges. Part of what he is getting at in the post is the way that high ed admin is hearing more and more about big new things like Twitter and figuring they need to get in on the action and use the medium to recruit or publicize their programs or schools. But they don't really think through what they're trying to do and who the audience is and whether the task or the people they have in mind are a good match for Twitter or a blog or a wiki or whatever. They run the risk, at best,  of running out of steam and having their efforts dry up and at worst of annoying people with spam like messages.

Go read his post.

I have been thinking a lot about it in part because one of the things I am working on this summer is a briefing paper for a committee on developing an appropriate use policy for the use of these tools at my own university. As I look around I am increasingly struck by higher ed blogs that shouldn't be blogs and twitter feeds that shouldn't be either. Clearly part of what's going on is that administrators are outsourcing the blogging or the twittering to subordinates who do the actual posting. We saw this in somewhat dramatic fashion this week when it became clear that Gov Mark Sanford was missing and wasn't in contact with family or staff but kept tweeting. That's because he doesn't post his own tweets. Then why do it? I know of several senior university administrators for whom the same thing is true. And you can tell. The thing that makes blogs and tweets good is the personality and the engagement of the writer. If it's delegated to staff it is generally not going to be there.

Some in higher ed that Alex highlights as good are the University of New South Wales, RMIT  Drake, and the McCombs School at UT Austin. 

And there's more

But only slightly related (I remain, after all, the Queen of the Non Sequiter),  an interesting paper from danah boyd, Scott Golder and Gilad Lotan on retweeting as a conversational practice. 

And it just occured to me though I am sure it has been obvious to everyone else for ages. Hardly anyone uses the term microblogging. It's all twitter. Twitter is the new hoover, the xerox, the thermos, the new genericization, the new eopnym.

Standard behavior from Blackboard

Yeah, maybe too snarky, but it does seem that we have been hearing about the embrace of standards for a while. In his new blog Blackboarder Ray Henderson says that Blackboard is going to be showing some more leadership in the area of standards. This is great news and certainly we need more of it.

However, commenter Roddy Warnock points to a critical part of Henderson's post vis

Once standards like these get implemented, creators of learning content and tools will of course still need to have formal partnerships (for example in our case participating in the Blackboard Building Blocks™ program or the Blackboard Content Provider network) with platform providers like us in order to connect their standards-compliant tool or content to eLearning platforms through supported interfaces.  That’s the same as it is today 

Doesn't seem that open. I would love to be proven wrong but I fear that Blackboard will continue like many LMSs to be the roach motel's of data. You can get it in, but you cant get it out. (ht Dorothea Salo on Institutional repositories).

Emily Sands on gender discrimination in the playwriting business

From Tyler Cowen I followed a link to this really neat presentation by Emily Glassberg Sands. I gather she's an economist (presumably not the Egypyologist who went missing down the nile in 1927.

Anyhow, the presentation is notable and well worth a look for 2 reasons.

1. As a Powerpoint it is really very good. Like a lot of people I tend to try toward having very few words (I fail at this btw). But Larry Lessig is my hero. Emily Sands' powerpoint is actually rather text heavy and certainly table heavy but watching the slide show at the link you get a very good sense of her argument, just by looking at the slides. And they really kepp you engaged.

2. The second neat thing is her research design and her marshalling of evidence around a rather tough and slippery issue - are female playwrights discriminated against compared with male writers? She gathers an impressive amount of data and looks at the issue from a number of different perspectives. I especially like her experimental approach in which she sent identical scripts under either a male of female name to over 2,000 theaters to see whether they'd accept them for production. I'm not going to tell you the answer, go check it out yourself. Now!