Accidental Pedagogy

Lev Gonick on Leadership for Web 2.0

There is a nice short piece in the new Educause review by Lev Gonick. He talks about the need for a change in how we run technology infrastructure on campus and the need for a more nimble response to new technologies and how faculty and students might use them.

Gonick argues that there is a

"need for a new kind of IT leadership, one that must surrender a modicum of control. Call it "open-source leadership." IT leaders must accommodate the contributions of the community rather than control them. They must learn to be supporters and enablers, not obstructionists. They must learn to cede some authority in this evolving world."

Unfortunately the article is short and he doesn't really discuss how we can do what he says we should. I think he is absolutely right we need to find a way to accommodate innovation without first running it through endless processes and committees and RFPs and pilot groups. But at the same time we also need to provide support for people using the new innovations and providing that support can be tough, even in small numbers. Training support people to have the flexibility and the ability to support something new every semester is difficult as well. But we do need to find those models.

Stephen Snarks on Standards

Stephen Downes had a great little piece of snark yesterday about the latest activity in the world of metadata standards. Money quote

all is the same in the world of standards. IMS is working on something in secret. OASIS has a web services approach. The open source OAI is taking something simple and making it complicated. UKOLN has a JISC-funded project to create something from scratch (with an acronym - SWORD - that ensures nobody will ever find it using Google).

Funny.

The problem with the "nothing to hide" argument about privacy

An interesting (and mercifully short - unusual for law reviews) article by Daniel Solove of GWU about the  faulty assumptions underlying the "I have nothing to hide therefore its ok" response to invasions of privacy.

Abstract

In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the nothing to hide argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: I've got nothing to hide. According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The nothing to hide argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.

DRM Tee Shirts

Via Boing Boing. I already ordered one of these

Public libraries and publishing

A short but pithy blog post from the Freakonomics blog about public libraries. The point they're trying to make is that the current intellectual property system is so haywire that were they to be established today (university libraries, for that matter too) there would be a huge pushback from publishers who would likely claim that every person borrowing a book represented a lost sale.

Dubner argues that publishers would likely

come up with a licensing agreement: the book costs $20 to own, with an additional $2 per year for every year beyond Year 1 it’s in circulation. I’m sure there would be a lot of other potential arrangements. And I am just as sure that, like a lot of systems that evolve over time, the library system is one that, if it were being built from scratch today, would have a very different set of dynamics and economics.

He also argues that libraries stimulate sales by developing a taste for reading in the young and introducing new writers to folks who might then go out and buy more of that persons books. The same arguments might be made for music.

Oddly the strongest complaints I have ever heard about second-hand bookstores (which rely on the right of first sale doctrine, same as libraries do) is from some faculty who get annoyed when their textbook goes on sale second-hand and from which they get no royalties. I imagine these same faculty members make liberal use of the library stacks and don't really think about the contradiction there.

Maybe I will feel different when my book comes out.

Virtual copyright infringement

It has been going on for a little while and now the perfect storm has come together: sex, copyright and Second Life. From Tech Crunch a story about how a guy selling virtual sex beds in Second Life is being sued by the guy who makes them in meatspace.

Borrowing, creativity and the problem of copyright

Jonathan lethem has a lovely and frighteningly literate essay in the recent harpers magazine about how we rely on borrowing to create new art. It warns about drawing too narrow an understanding about both copyright and plagiarism.

From If:Book

The political importance of fair use

From the if:book blog which is a project of the Institute for the Future of the Book there is an interesting post that highlights why fair use rights are so important. A protester cataloged instances of hate and violent speech on talk radio (owned by parent company Disney) and sent accounts of this to advertisers accompanied by short audio clips of the incidents he described. Disney responded by contacting his ISP and getting his blog pulled offline because of alleged copyright infringement. I hope this gets taken further in the courts.

There is also a small bit of humor to be found. They refer to Daily Kos as the The Daily Kos -- is that part of the Internets or the Tubes?

Our role as educators

I had seen this link to a site sponsored by Educause and the RIAA a few days ago and had been wondering how to respond. I found the site both risible and deeply troubling (not to mention doomed to failure), but had been trying to figure out an appropriate way of describing my thoughts. Lanny Arvan hits the nail on the head. He writes:

Nowadays, I make copies of all sorts of content online (though mostly images and documents) and redistribute primarily via email, where I believe I can make a quite credible case for Fair Use since I literally do live my job – promoting learning technology – and my purpose is almost certainly educational (as well as the other factors for a fair use case such as the impact on the market being negligible). So I found it disturbing yesterday when I learned that Educause was promoting this site, in support of an RIAA sponsored video about illegal file sharing. The video doesn’t mention Fair Use. Nor does it mention content produced by instructors that is intended to be free for their students to download, nor other content produced by students themselves aimed at their fellow students, nor content that is freely available by podcast, etc.

And that the video itself has Graham Spanier, President of Penn State, featured in it is also disappointing, because that gives credibility to what is an overly simplistic message. The message doesn’t encourage students to think about the issues and modify their behavior because of the thinking. It encourages them to conform to the message out of fear that they might get sued for copyright violation. It is an argument about avoiding punishment, not about the sensibility of obeying the law.

Perhaps with this post I’ll end up at odds with the higher ups in administration from my own campus on this one. But to be clear I’m not denying that illegal file sharing is a problem. Instead, I’m trying to affirm that our students must be educated as adults with messages that appeal to their own sensibility, skepticism, and general distrust of authority. And in doing my little bit, I’m giving modest effort to follow Dylan in sticking to our own principles as we define them.

Legal Guide to Podcasting

Creative Commons has posted a nifty looking guide to some of the legal things you and your organization should think about when doing podcasting. You can find it here.