Colin Rhinesmith

Share This

I’m beginning my final paper for my directed study on issues related to open access to educational materials and copyright law. Here’s my working abstract:

In recent years, open access repositories have become increasingly popular tools for teaching and learning in the digital age. But copyright law remains a serious obstacle to these types of open sharing models. Further, it has created a culture of confusion and fear of legal backlash among educators and the institutions to which they belong. The result has led many to believe that locking down educational materials behind walled-gardens is the best path forward. This paper reviews recent educational and technological efforts towards overcoming these barriers. The author provides a literature review on the issues relevant to this heated debate between how to balance the rights of copyright holders with those who seek to use copyrighted materials for teaching and learning in the digital age.

Share This

The Internet & Society 2007 conference videos are now available for viewing on Democracy: Internet TV. They can also be watched on blip.tv.

We’re working on the mpeg2 files for University Channel so folks at Public Access TV centers and other channels can download them for broadcast.

For the complete conference audio and video archives, please visit the Media page at IS2K7.org.

All videos are licensed by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license.

Share This

I’ve been working on a first pass at my directed study proposal for the fall. Here it is:

“Digital media, the Internet and copyright law present growing challenges to educators and academic institutions working to share access to teaching and learning resources inside and outside the classroom. But what is a classroom in the digital age? Where does the classroom begin and end when online learning materials become increasingly accessible through open, walled, and semi-walled gardens? This course will examine these and other questions, including:

• What is the mission of University?
• What are recommended Fair Use guidelines and best practices for educators and students in the digital age?
• What software platforms are being used and developed to encourage online sharing of educational materials while balancing the rights of copyright owners and concerns of academic institutions?

To investigate these issues, the course will be divided into three sections to further explore recent scholarship and innovative educational initiatives related to the topics above. The final project will result in a 25 page research paper. In conducting research for this study, the course will include a directed study blog incorporating del.icio.us links (and this wiki) to allow the instructor and the public at-large to participate in a collaborative learning environment.”

The wiki for the directed study is closed, but I will be setting up a blog which will be open for participation. More soon . . .

Share This

The photo above includes some notes from the “Open Access at University - OpenCourseWare and Beyond” afternoon working group session at yesterday’s IS2K7 conference.

This session provided an opportunity for participants to learn more from Anne Margulies about MIT’s OpenCourseWare project and some of the opportunities and challenges.

Here are some of my notes from the working group:

Should open access be considered as part of the original mission of university?

Once MIT started publishing the raw materials, students were not as concerned as they were in the beginning. 32% of students said that open access (OA) led favorably in their decision to go to MIT. It was the alumni who spoke the loudest, concerned about the money they spent on acquiring their degrees, now content would be free for everyone.

The OA consortium is comprised of over 150 institutions, mainly non-U.S. schools.

Intellectual property is still the biggest problem with OA at MIT. When they use third party material they can not publish it. It is not as complete as it could be.

Q: Has the OpenCourseWare project (OCW) had effect on the attendance of lectures?

A: (Anne) This was a major concern. The faculty were concerned so OCW at MIT surveyed them. The faculty had not noticed a significant drop in attendance. They are able to use their class time in a different way, because students can get the material outside the class.

The students do come with interesting questions in mind. For this reason, OCW has had a positive impact at MIT.

Q: How will this impact career building among faculty? how does it impact tenure?

A: We’re starting to bring agencies together to make peer review part of the deal.

Q: How do you generate publicity for these initiatives?

A: (Anne) We don’t do it very well. We’ve been passive about it and as a result, we’re only scratching the surface for those who can benefit from this material.

About two years ago there was a big amount of traffic from MIT to our site. Indeed MIT students used the site regularly about 70%. 40% of faculty used the OCW site to check what their colleagues were teaching and to make sure the pre-reqs were met so that their students were learning.

MIT faculty are much more aware of what other faculty are learning and they are learning best practices in informal ways. OCW at MIT has connected faculty, which in one instance helped create a new course out of two faculty members who were both interested in the same disciplines.

Marketing and PR that have had positive experiences with OCW - look to students for this (blogging, etc.). Elizabeth Stark said educating faculty is key - students can help.

There are a large number of course websites that are made public. Need the agreement among faculty to make these websites open. And that faculty (need to) improve their websites.

Some of the tenure binders have references to the quality of their OCW site and the impact of their site outside of MIT. Early adopters got all kinds of positive feedback and praise. They saw they that were contributed to their field and the word spread, and the tipping point happened where students asked “Why aren’t you publishing this material in an open way?”

We found many gems and treasures that we’re investing in k-12 websites, but no good examples. Teachers can’t find anything that meets those standards.

Let the teachers know really early on what the benefit is for them and it might help speed the uptake of other profs.

OCW at MIT is based on eduCommons developed at Utah State U.

Q: What has Sloan’s response to OCW at MIT?

A: (Anne) They’ve got courses up there (on OCW).

There is a way to export from proprietary platforms (courseware) into EduCommons or another platform. So the teaching site is very dynamic.

Moving forward/Outstanding Issues:

• Creating communities around disciplines, educational networking sites.

• Do we want every course that’s taught or do we want courses of certain qualities?

See working group session wiki for more.

Share This

The photo above is a slide from Mara Hancock’s (UC Berkeley) presentation during the “Next Steps I - New Structures and Efficiences” session at CCNMTL’s Video, Education, and Open Content conference. See more pics from Mara’s presentation and from the conference on Flickr.

Share This

Here are my notes from Brian Newman’s (ReNew Media) talk at at CCNMTL’s Video, Education, and Open Content conference:

ReNew Media is founded by Rockefeller Foundation to help media artists with funding their projects. ReNew offers Media Arts Scholarships and in this process they hear a lot about what filmmakers and media artists do not make (meaning $$) from their productions.

Media Artists and Open Content Current Paradigm

• Artists want: freedom to create their vision and Second is that they hope to make a living by doing so.
• They are under-funded in an over-produced field.
• Everyone thinks they will be discovered.
• There is limited thinking about distribution and educational use.
• No real numbers to tell you how little filmmakers are making on their films.
• Paid educational marketplace important
• Most not very aware of alternate licensing, or of open content movement
• Most are resistent to the notion of alternate licensing like CC
• Filmmakers and Distributors like payment and DRM
• No viable model which pays them for their work

ReNew thought about how to fund media artists’ work up front. Stipulation of funding was that the work had to transfer to an alternate licensing (Creative Commons, etc.) scheme after 5 years. In asking that question, they found that filmmakers and other media artists’ are open to those ideas.

They decided to give money to artists saying, “we’ll give you money up front” to make a short piece under a CC license. They got some great works which they premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. They have a contest that allows people to remix the work.

ReNew has contracted with Intelligent Television to study the economics of distribution. With the goal of finding out how much filmmakers are actually making, because there is no information here. Brian says there are really only about 4 or 5 people every year who are making money off of independent/documentary films.

Proposals for Open Video Finance

• It’s not black and white
• Need to enlarge our thinking and accept new ideas which combine our hopes and current realities
• Need for real numbers on funding, revenue from various markets and consumer/educational preferences
• Need viable models for open content - and very few, if any, exist

Philanthropy needs to think about new ways to fund open content projects.

ReNew is also working on a project called The Reframe Project, subtitled, “Making our visual Heritage accessible to all”.

There’s a lot of film stuck on the shelf that educators want to use which are not open. ReNew is interested in sustainable models for funding digitization and archival projects. They are working with Amazon on the project. The deal is non-exclusive. ReNew will help with digitization and they will give sources back as a DVD. Owners can take it back and make it free or sell it all on iTunes.

They are helping people with delivery through:

• DVD on demand
• Digital download to own or rent
• Variable time, users, prices (set by rights holder)
• Ingest on demand (through Amazon)

All of these processes are opt-in.

Brian also talked about the new Reframe website, which will include:

• Educational focus
• Curated - top down, bottom up
• Branded
• Participatory
• Recommendation systems (from Amazon)

They will also being doing a lot of work on rights issues. They are hoping it can become a nexus for people interested in these issues. They think this project will be a sustainable solution for long-term support.

Share This

Here are my notes from Richard Lucier’s (Scholarly Communication Institute) talk at CCNMTL’s Video, Education, and Open Content conference:

Scholarly Communications Institute (SCI) is a 6 year Project, funded by the Mellon Institute and “housed” at the University of Virginia. The Institute is involved with:

• Research and Discovery
• Analysis
• Presentation
• Presentation
• Dissemination
• Access and Use

SCI is involved mainly with Humanities scholars (interest of Mellon Foundation). SCI realizes that “digital scholarship is collaborative”. The overall goal of the institute is to create an opportunity for scholars to understand and embrace digital scholarship. SCI components involve summer meetings, communities of action, and real advances in digital scholarship. What they hope is to create are communities of action in a disciplinary way to create real advances in digital scholarship.

They also bring to the summer meeting 3 to 6 graduate students. They’ve found that the grad students have a significant impact on the senior scholars in terms of creating new ways for digital scholarship and analysis.

SCI is also concerned with issues of ethics across a number of different fields, including biomedical and journalistic ethics, etc.

The communities of action are created around publication and knowledge gathering. The real advances they have made include, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians Online and Architecture Visual Resource Network. This is not just an online journal, but it is a journal that seeks submissions in a variety of different technological forms. It has become a very different resource for people to access and to publish in. The Architecture Visual Resource Network will be a resource that allows people to input resources and have a vetting process that allows them to move from a big pile of info to something embedded into a database sanctioned by the Society of Architectural Historians. They have also used Flickr in their work to evaluate tagging v. structured metadata (to be able to publish, etc.).

SCI is currently interested in visual media scholars: film, video, photography, 3-d simulations and new media art. They are bringing new media scholars together to better understand the critical aspects of digital media for their work in order to understand the architectures that need to be put in place. They are interested in bringing together both theorists and practitioners. What they hope to develop this summer is a visual media scholar community to explore a community of action moving forward (something that NEH, Mellon and other foundations are interested in supporting).

Share This

Here are my notes from Rick Prelinger’s (Prelinger Archives and Internet Archive) keynote at CCNMTL’s Video, Education, and Open Content conference:

Title: “Remarks from a recovered archivist” - The promise of educational media.

There have been 1/4 million of (audio/visual) works produced for educators.

• What can we do?

1. Leverage existing resources - we need to free educational materials from obscurity. We need to free educational and public media archives. Can we try to de-monitize an area that is truly import to our culture (to make it more available).

2. Segmentation - cutting the archive into little pieces will make the archives much more accessible. It’s really hard to touch a 12-minute rich media object. Hour archives are filled with lots of content. If we break them into short logical segments with human intervention, we gain a tremendous amount a value. As a result, items (will be) more suited to fit into an encyclopedia

3. Openness - the concept of open production is tremendously exciting. Openness in education is conceptually and practically tied together. But if we want to avoid doing public/educational tv over again we need to strongly conside the idea of openness. We need to think of it as a broad spectrum. Openness means not just seeing the book page, but the text too.

• If you have this (openness), you can take it, mash it up. It’s not just about watching a movie, but being able to download the EDL (edit decision lists), etc. to make it easier for public to access and resuse the material for cretive purposes.

Openness on the web means everyone can crawl, naviagte and index what they find on the web. Also, it is the freedom to remix in an open domain. Everything needs to be editable. Openess is freedom to annotate and share the network with others. We really need to integrate editing tools - the swiss army knife for video, etc.

Openness enables interoperability. People are starting to think about this in the library world. Quilting is an early form of sampling. It relies on interoperabilty to fit into a matrix, etc. Interoperability rests on openess. We need to default to openness and share cultural materials.

4. Moratorium - we need new models and giving them space to flourish. Let’s declare a moratorium. Let’s see what sticks.

Points of departure - There is an opportunity to bridge archiving, video, and education.

Archives are lost to YouTube and we need to figure out how to recoup. If people look at archives as obstacles to access, then we’re in serious trouble.

We always think about re-purposing. This should give us pause. There is a long history of this.

• Should we digitize all the lectures?
• Should we have everything online?
• Do we need to break with the past, or is everything raws material for mashups?

. . . Let’s leave this to the viewers to decide.

User generated content enriches the libraries, but produces a dialogue and will have a profound impact on their shape and design.

Share This

Notes from Peter Gerhardt’s (BBC Creative Archive) talk at CCNMTL’s Video, Education, and Open Content conference:

They determined a portion of the BBC archive to release for re-use by the people who pay for the BBC in the UK. But before setting out on the project they had to prove that it would have an impact in the market. They ran the project for about 18 months. They had about 100,000 registered users. It was completely free for them to do so. The people using the site were educational folks and learners, people interested in local history and natural history. It was all from the factual and news areas. They were more restricted when it came to the entertainment.

As a pilot, it was a reasonable success. It provided a lot of data that proved there was a strong public appetite to engage with the BBC archives.

The BBC is a heavily regulated institution. The new BBC trust is the regulator appointed by the government. The function of the trust is to simply approve what the BBC does. The trust has been in operation for six months and its only had time to approve one new idea.

The debate is about the old and the new. It’s about allowing people to interact with the media that people grew up with.

Share This