digital digs

fair use and public pedagogy

An interesting report (PDF) mentioned in the Chronicle from the Center for Social Media on the subject of Fair Use in education. Not surprisingly, the report notes that educators are often confused about fair use and how it applies to them. In this report's account, it would seem that we often err too heavily on being overly restrictive in our interpretations (though clearly some faculty believe anything they do for an "educational purpose" is ok). This business is confusing, and there are, in reality, no definitive guidelines. Each case is open to interpretation.

I tend to divide copyright issues into three areas and then add a caveat.

File Under "what we should already know about technology"

In the Chronicle yesterday a report from the EDUCAUSE conference, "Technology Is Underutilized in Higher Education." Robert Mendenhall, the president of the Western Governors University and member of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, offered the following response to the question of whether technology reduced costs or drove up tuition:

“I think technology has created the greatest productivity improvement in history over the past 20 years across every segment of our society — except in education... The way technology improved productivity in every other industry is that we changed the way we did things — we changed the business process, he said. “We still do education the way we did it 500 years ago,” he said. “Where technology has the potential, it’s not being realized today.” He said that technology should be used more often to deliver information to students, freeing instructors to lead discussions, answer questions, and interact closely with students.

Obviously, by far, the largest area of expense at any college is faculty salaries. That's not because we get paid so much. It just means that teaching and learning are the fundamental activities of a college. So when you start talking about technology reducing costs, those cost reductions, if they are to be significant must be coming from faculty, and if not faculty then staff (though it seems to me that technology increases often require more support staff, at least in the area of technical support). So faculty sometimes end up eying computers the way that weavers eyed the mechanical loom.

Not surprisingly, I don't quite see it that way...

brainstorming strategic planning

Strategic planning is just part of the academic world these days. It goes along with assessment and such. It doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. As I mentioned in my previous post about my "strengths," coming up with ideas and developing plans are things I enjoy doing.

So to me, it's an interesting question to ask "What should the BA in English class of 2015 look like?" and then perhaps start to think about how we get there. Here at least are some notes toward an answer to that question, a list of qualities in no particular order:

• knowledge of literary history in English, including world anglophone literatures
• knowledge of linguistics
• understanding of critical-interpretive methods
• understanding of rhetorical theory and practice
• understanding of emergent communication practices, media, and networks
• experience writing in a variety of genres (academic, "creative," professional)
• experience with editing and revising
• experience composing in a variety of media
• opportunities for "real world" professional experiences (e.g. internships, publishing, service learning, etc.)

Obviously, each of these could be greatly expanded, and one could create a major focusing on only one or two of these. However, I see English as a liberal arts degree and hence as more catholic (with a small "c") than specialized. I also think that you could overlap some of these qualities within courses. Indeed, overlap is necessary!

a pedagogy of strength

For a couple semesters Rhonda has been part of a teaching pilot that employs the StrengthsFinder survey to help students identify their personal strengths. If you aren't familiar with StrengthsFinder, basically it is a psychological test. In the test you are presented with 117 paired statements and you choose the one that best describes you. The end result is you are identified as having five strength themes out of 34 possible themes. That may not sound like very many categories, but there are actually millions of possible combinations.

Anyway, the underlying concept is that culturally we tend to focus too much on weaknesses. We are often tied to the notion that we can do anything if we try hard enough. Instead, as the argument goes, we would be better off investing in our strengths, making the most of the things we do best.

So here are my strengths...

MacArthur/HASTAC Digital Media and Learning Competition

Having had much time to write here (pretty obvious I think). I've been working hard on a grant application for this Digital Media and Learning Competition for our NeoVox Project. Anything with MacArthur is likely to be highly competitive, but I believe we've got a strong idea.

Here's the idea in a nutshell. Since 1999, NeoVox has operated as an "international college student magazine." Usually we have worked with faculty at various institutions to have their students submit work and collaborate with our students. Occasionally students have submitted material on their own. It's worked out fairly well.

My idea, however, was to intensify the level of collaboration possible between students and faculty by building a website that encourages greater participation. Currently, all you get to see is the end product. My idea is to have the entire collaboration take place online in a participatory fashion. We are proposing to work with faculty at institutions in Turkey, China, Kenya, Peru, and Costa Rica (places where Cortland already has institutional relations). We would collaboratively decide upon a couple themes that have global dimensions (e.g. poverty, environment, education, etc.). Working within the context of courses, students from these institutions would meet online and discuss potential, specific projects and tasks to undertake. They would then carry out these tasks and upload raw material (in the form of text, video, image, audio, etc.) to the site. This material would then be discussed. Finally students would use the uploaded material as a media database for creating multimedia productions for publication in the magazine. As a result, every piece could include media from each of the institutions.

Clearly we will face issues of translation in some of these instances. We do have plans for working that out. In fact there will be a number of challenges to engaging in this level of coordination. That's why we're looking for external support to move in this direction. At the same time I think it's a great opportunity to combine international education and digital literacy.

Synchronous learning in asynchronous courses: another lesson from Second Life

So this is fairly obvious... I'm teaching an online course, which, like just about every online course, is offered asynchronously. No meeting time. In the pre-SL, 2-D web world I suppose there are reasons for scheduling meeting times for online courses, primarily so you could have some live discussion or presentation I guess. At Cortland though, where we don't have any distance education students, if you want to do something live, you might as well do it on campus. (This is particularly true for undergraduate students; the grad students are commuters and might appreciate live, distance education.)

But I digress. The point is that we have no common meeting time. This proves to be a problem for working in Second Life. So in the future, if I am to teach in SL, it would be useful to schedule a common meeting time for my online course. That doesn't mean that we would do all our work in SL at the common time, but I think it would be useful for several purposes:

• Orientation
• In-world presentations
• Coordinating meeting times for students (at least we know one time they can meet!)

However, I don't think that's enough. I am seeing that one of the advantages of SL is the opportunity to collaborate internationally. Thus it would be useful not only to have a time for my online class to meet but also to coordinate that time with partners. Thus all of our students could meet during a set time.