I thought I’d use this post to share some of the work that I’m currently involved in. I find that these periodic updates also help me to get my head around it all, particularly as the semester winds down.

Grad School

This semester at Emerson College, I’m taking one class, I’m involved in a directed study and I’ve started my year-long thesis project. Here are some updates:

Hub2: As I’ve noted previously, I’m involved in a course at Emerson College that is exploring civic engagement through the design and social use of virtual platforms. Hub2 is the umbrella program, that currently involves students enrolled in a day class (that I’m in) and a night course. I’ve blogged a bunch about our group project in SL here and also on my blog at Emerson College. Soon, I’ll be starting a research paper around issues involved in the course

Fair Use, Media and Education in the Digital Age: This directed study seeks to learn more about the challenges facing educators and students in sharing online access to copyrighted material. So far, I’ve explored a number of philosophical, political, and legal issues related to this ongoing balancing act between copyright holders and educators. I’m currently structuring ideas for my research paper due at the end of this semester.

Community Media in Transition: While I’m very lucky that I enjoy all of my courses at Emerson, my grad thesis is perhaps the most exciting part of my work this semester. I’ve refined the topic a bit. I began a study recently that seeks to understand the role of the community media center for those involved in this form of local media practice. The purpose is to challenge the notion that the community media center (Public Access TV) is no longer necessary because of the Internet. I’m grateful to those in access who have contributed to my thinking on this topic.

Paid Research and Digital Media Production

The Digital Lyceum: Also at Emerson College this semester, I am supporting two faculty members for a NEH grant-funded project to research mixed-reality event production in the humanities. The Digital Lyceum, seeks to develop best practices and to propose a sustainable model for producing these with the purpose of contributing to humanities scholarship.

Citizen Media Law Podcast: We’re off and running with our new podcast at the Citizen Media Law Project at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. I’ve had a lot of fun working on this project. We’re still experimenting with the format and look forward to seeing how it progresses.

Volunteer Service

Action Coalition for Media Education: The new ACME website launched this fall and we’ve been pushing our fundraiser at the site. There’s lots of activity there, including blogging from board members and others. I’m excited that we’ve been able to license our media education materials under a Creative Commons Attribution Nonommercial 3.0 Unported license.

Cambridge Community Television: I’ve been working with others in the Membership, Outreach and Advisory Committee on a report about our recent web survey of CCTV members. The survey was very successful and I thank everyone in the committee for their hard work.

For these reasons above, I haven’t had a lot of time to blog here. But, I look forward to being more active on this site as I head towards the home stretch in December. I’m also looking forward to my Television Culture and Communication Ethics and Diversity courses next semester, along with completing my grad thesis. A busy year and lots to be thankful for.

In a previous post, I mentioned a course that I was designing for the fall. At that point, the emphasis for the Directed Study included an examination of how the mission of University relates to Fair Use of digital media in education. Since then, my adviser, Eric Gordon and I decided to shift focus a bit to consider the question “What does it mean to be fair?” in this context.

I’ve updated the course wiki. The wiki is still closed, but I moved the Proposal to the front page so it is accessible to the public. The course will include a podcast series and blog that will archive research for the project. I’m looking forward to this course and to launching my thesis in the fall. It’s going to be a busy semester!

Lewis Hyde (Berkman Center Fellow) and Pat Aufderheide (Center for Social Media)

The photo above was taken at yesterday morning’s working group session tltled “University Agenda for Fair Use” at the Internet & Society 2007 (IS2K7) conference at Harvard, co-sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

I was particularly interested in this session because it was a continuing on our recent efforts to better understand the range of technical and legal challenges facing educators within open academic media publishing.

Here are some of my brief notes from the working group session:

How do you (educators and media artists) use copyrighted material in your work?

The Center for Social Media is working with Renee Hobbes to develop a document to understand how the practices are impacting their educational capacity. The doc will be coming out in the fall. They are looking to develop a code of practice that will spill over into other disciplines.

Lewis Hyde says that it’s important to start with the use community and not the law. The law is to vague. Best to start with real examples and work from there.

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Fair use issues facing organizations and educational institutions from small working group session:

How are rights to fair use going to enable content distribution and at the same time enable rights to compensation? Is the university a protected space or should it be a protected space when it comes to media sharing?

There a blanket licenses for performances. Why can’t there be that blanket licenses for fair use in the classroom?

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Reportbacks and last half of working group session:

Do creators understand what they can do and what they can’t do? What happens when they take in-class uses and bring them outside the classroom? In-class use is non-infriging, but out of class use will be infringing?

Need to look at specific cases within different academic disciplines to come up with reasonable touch-stones for evaluating what is fair use?

Looking for something that would provide (fair use) guidance for academics.