Tama’s eLearning Blog

To explore, expand and expound upon the emerging Australasian Commons, the Creative Commons Australia team have organised a free one-day symposium which investigates a range of activities, programme and philosophies driving open access and the cultural commons across Australia, New Zealand and South-East Asia.  I’ll be there, participating in a panel on the Creative Commons and Education, as well joining the team facilitating a workshop on ‘Building Knowledge: Open Education Resources (OER) and Research Materials’.  Here are all the details:

… are proud to announce that registration is now officially open for the Creative Commons ‘Building an Australasian Commons’ Conference. The conference will be held on Tuesday 24th June 2008 from 8.30am – 5pm at the State Library of Queensland, South Brisbane, and is proudly supported by Creative Commons Australia (http://creativecommons.org.au), the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (http://www.cci.edu.aau), and the State Library of Queensland (http://www.slq.qld.gov.au).
This event provides an opportunity for those interested in the free internet to come together to exchange ideas, information and inspiration. It brings together experts from Australasia to discuss the latest developments and implementations of Creative Commons in the region. The conference aims to be an open forum where anyone can voice their thoughts on issues relating to furthering the commons worldwide.
The current programme detailing the array of presentations, workshops and round table discussions can be found at http://creativecommons.org.au/australasiancommons. Attendance is free and open to all comers. However, places are limited, so if you’re interested in attending please register ASAP. Registration closes 9  June 2008. You can download the registration form at http://creativecommons.org.au/materials/ccauconf08/
australasian_commons_conference_registration.pdf and return it via email to Elliott@creativecommons.org.au.
The conference will be followed on the day at 6pm by the second CCau ccSalon, a showcase of Creative Commons music, art, film and text from Australia and the region.  This will be a great opportunity to mingle and relax after the day’s events while experiencing CC works in action. We look forward to welcoming you at ‘Building an Australasian Commons’.

Keep in mind, it’s a completely free event, so if you’re interested and can be in sunny Brisbane on 24 June, I’ll see you there!

[Image based on Them colors... by jurek d CC BY] [X Post]

It would appear that the University of New South Wales (UNSW) has the dubious honours of being the first Australian university to have their own YouTube channel.  In the past couple of months, there have been a number of reports of US universities setting up on YouTube.  For example, this article from News.com on UC Berkeley’s channel:

YouTube is now an important teaching tool at UC Berkeley.

The school announced on Wednesday that it has begun posting entire course lectures on the Web’s No.1 video-sharing site.

Berkeley officials claimed in a statement that the university is the first to make full course lectures available on YouTube. The school said that over 300 hours of videotaped courses will be available at youtube.com/ucberkeley.

Berkeley said it will continue to expand the offering. The topics of study found on YouTube included chemistry, physics, biology and even a lecture on search-engine technology given in 2005 by Google cofounder Sergey Brin.

“UC Berkeley on YouTube will provide a public window into university life, academics, events and athletics, which will build on our rich tradition of open educational content for the larger community,” said Christina Maslach, UC Berkeley’s vice provost for undergraduate education in a statement.

Similarly excited press has greeted other US universities, this article on the University of Southern California’s channel (Via).  However, the I think educational administrator and web 2.0 aficionado Greg Whitby notes probably wins the most excited prize for his take on the UNSW channel (Via):

While it?s a great marketing strategy, it recognises where today?s students are.  Although the channel will broadcast some lecturers in an attempt to reach potential students, it captures the ubquitous nature and popularity of Web 2.0.  

This is the democratisation of knowledge - no longer contained within lecture theatres or classrooms but shared.  Learning becomes accessible, anywhere, anytime.  Transportable, transparent, relevant and exciting.

The University of NSW is to be applauded but we still lag behind.  iTunes has developed a store dedicated to education called University.  It?s ?the campus that never sleeps? -  allowing universities across the US to upload audio/video lectures, interviews, debates, presentations for students - any age, anywhere.  And it?s free. It?s astounding and exciting to think that a cohort of students and teachers from a school western Sydney can watch a biology lecture from MIT. 

The challenge for us is to open our K-12 classrooms to a new audience - to share knowledge as professionals and to showcase quality learning and teaching as we move from isolated classrooms to a connected global learning environment.

Readers of any of my blogs will know I’m also an advocate for integrating certain web 2.0 tools into learning and teaching.  However, these announcements seem oddly familiar to me - it’s just like the press that came out as pretty much every university in the world embraced podcasting one after another, each pushing out press releases about embracing the future.  However, what didn’t happen half as readily was the pedagogical discussion about how podcasting should or could be used in education.  Nor, I have to say, are we seeing much interrogation of the use of online video via YouTube or other services.  Let me be clear: there is certainly value in using YouTube in particular ways in education.  However, as I argued about podcasting in the past, it’s probably more important to focus on working out new ways to engage students (such as having them create content for podcasting or to post on YouTube) rather than primarily just replicating the top-down structures of lecture delivery. (I don’t have a problem with recorded lectures, I should add, I just don’t think that’s all we should worry about.)

It’s also worth keeping in mind that YouTube is a two-way street as demonstrated by clips of teachers at their worst appearing on YouTube.

From The Australian:

TODAY’S students will be tomorrow’s university recruiting agents on the social web, Swinburne University of Technology vice-chancellor Ian Young has predicted. “Prospective students are getting more and more information on universities from sites like Facebook,” he said. “In the future, existing students in some respect will become recruiting agents for universities.”

Damn right.  They’ll be searching blogs for information about potential courses, too!

As readers of my main blog will know, I spent Friday at the Australian Blogging Conference at QUT’s Creative Industries Precinct in Brisbane. It was a fabulous, stimulating and intellectually rich conference and a great end to Tama’s-month-o-conferencing. I was the facilitator for the ‘Blogging and Education’ session so thought, in the spirit of the conference, I’d better get my notes up here:

Blogs and Education

The session ran for two hours, with a good balance between K-12 educators and those of us from the Higher Ed sector. After a brief (well, brief for me) introduction, the session was loosely structured around three main questions…

Why blog in education?

The Pros

* Allowing students to connect with community, family and an intellectual arena beyond the boundaries of the classroom.
* While most educational institutions have some sort of Learning Management System (such as Blackboard), the architecture of these systems tends to be inward-focusing, getting students thinking that everything they need is inside the walls of the black box. Blogging, by contrast, is outwardly-focused and keeps students focused on the broader (potential) public or audience they may be writing for. Thus, if we’re teaching life-long skills, blogs are often better platforms, due to their openness, than other closed systems.
* Blogs can meaningfully extend the educational experience, giving students a space to engage, write and communicate beyond the tutorial room. The uptake of this opportunity will often be uneven, but it’s often the less confident students who flourish in blogged communication.
* in certain contexts, blogs can become ’student property’ once a particular unit of course is over, thus allowing students to continue to build and use their blogs (this clearly differs depending on the context and aim of an educational blog, and on the age of the participants).
* Blogging as an ethos is about sharing knowledge, building ties and acknowledging the input of others - all key characteristics of good pedagogy!

The Cons

* Having purchased the (usually quite expensive) Learning Management System, the majority of schools and universities invest most of the training, support and infrastructure costs to maintain the hardware and use of this system. Blogging is thus often done using peripheral tools which educators must teach themselves to use rather than getting central support.
* Many institutions desire to contain and control everything that students are producing, both in terms of protecting student privacy and in terms of protecting institutional intellectual property or even just keeping work away from outside scrutiny. While this can be overcome, it’s often IT and central policies which have to be convinced and converted to make the use of blogs (and other web 2.0 tools) feasible.
* At times education in Australia is still focused on the idea of a digital divide - where the aim is to get every student access to a computer - whereas the meaningful discussion needs, really, to shift to the idea of the participation gap - where the focus needs to be on ensuring all students are familiar with network and digital literacies, thus being able the meaningfully utilise social software and other tools, which is a lot more than just having occasional access to the internet.
* The mythos of the digital natives tends to scare many educators because it suggests that many younger people (dubbed digital natives as they’ve never know a world without the internet) will always have more familiarity than their teachers (who are dubbed digital immigrants since the web appeared at some point during their lifetime) and thus teachers are worried about not being knowledgeable in these areas.

Examples and reflections?

K-12 Examples

* Year one ‘Little Gems’ blog - Amanda Rablin demonstrated this outstanding blog by year one students (!) which not only broadened their classroom experience, but also showed a level of reflexivity well beyond the primary school level!
* PodKids Australia - From a year 4/5 class in a WA country town who have used podcasting (and their blog) to communicate with their parents and the wider world in a sensible, thoughtful and safe manner.

Higher Ed Examples

* Self.Net Tutorial (Monday 2pm) blog - An example of a blog used to expand the engagement of students in the tutorial process, and extend their potential interaction beyond the confines of the classroom.
* iGeneration Honours Unit blogs - A full university unit where the entire curriculum is online (collaboratively constructed by the unit coordinator and the students) as well as all of the students work - which include critical evaluations of blogs and podcasts as the major assessment item - and the week-by-week tutorials in the course.
* Communication Studies 1101 link blog - the least exciting of all the examples, but nevertheless useful, this blog is simply a series of links to useful material for students in a first-year Communication Studies course at UWA.

(All three Higher Ed examples use Creative Commons licenses to make legally explicit the intention that students’ content can be build-upon by others, on the condition of citation. I was particularly pleased to see both Elliott Bledscoe and Jessica Coates from Creative Commons Australia in this session!)

Missing from these examples was the best use of blogging as per blogging as a participatory cultural form which is a course-length blog maintained across the three to five years of a degree. One good example I’ve found now that the session is over is Sarah Demicoli’s Looking Up? blog; notably Sarah is a student in Adrian Miles’ Labsome Honours cohort.

Should academics blog?

This question ended up being divided into two parts: should K-12 teachers blog, and should academics (and doctoral students) blog? The first question proved far more complicated in that there is an expectation that teachers in the K-12 environment will share less of their personal lives with the world. The accountability that comes with being a teacher - especially from parental expectations - means it’s something of a challenge to share too much of a teacher’s life publicly, less it be seen and critiqued by parents or students. Likewise, the important line between teachers and students was one of those areas where teachers need to be especially careful when using social networks like Facebook or MySpace because ‘friending’ students might inadvertently be read as entering into a social dynamic with students which is generally something of a taboo. Some folks felt this was particularly complicated since some teachers using social networks might be less familiar with the social norms of the platforms and accidentally cross a line - or be perceived to cross a line - by accident. Sadly, excessive accountability seems to be one of the major reasons that teachers would be hesitant to blog - or at least only blog on a narrow band of topics. That said, there was still a sense that teachers would blog if they found the right reason or topic, but that the boundaries as to what other personal information would find its way online would be a very solid boundary indeed!

On the ’should academics blog?’ front, things were decidedly more optimistic. There was a strong sense that academic blogs were a rich source of information, insight and commentary and that these were often far more accessible than other forms of academic writing. I asked a particularly loaded question - should academics feel obliged to blog since in publicly funded institutions the onus is to share our thoughts, research and ideas with the public, not just a our peers via peer viewed gatekeeping - and a few people were enthused by this idea, although there were a few comments about the need to have peer review before academic ideas escape into the world. The confusion surrounding danah boyd’s MySpace/Facebook class paper, and her subsequent reflections on the process, proved a useful example. That said, the biggest boundary to academic blogging seemed to be the amount of time it might take, but most people in the session thought it was time well spent!

I should add that these notes are re-constituted from rather poorly recorded keywords during the session, so further reflections, comments and notes on this session are most definitely welcome!

The Rest of the Conference

I don’t have terribly detailed notes from the other sessions I attended (which might be a blessing since caught the red-eye from Perth the night before the conference was thus a little less than coherent in the morning sessions), but thankfully being a blogged event, there are plenty of posts about the conference worth reading. Reflections well worth reading include those from Senator Andrew Bartlett, Australia’s most web-savvy politician. Derek Barry has posted three detailed reports on the Morning Panel discussion, The Politics of Blogging session and the panel on Citizen Journalism. Mark Bahnisch, one of the Politics of Blogging facilitators, has also posted on the ’state of political blogging’ specifically for that session. Robyn Rebollo has notes from the conference which include reflections on the Legal Issues and Blogs session. Nick Hodge was one of the facilitators for the Business Blogging session and has posted both his notes and powerpoint slides. Likewise, Joanne Jacobs has some useful notes from The Future of Blogging closing session, and Kate Davis’ notes from the parallel ‘Building a Better Blog’ session are useful, too. Conference notes and reports keep emerging, so watch the blogoz tag on Technorati for more.

I should say, as well, that I was fortunate enough to catch up with a whole bunch of folk I’ve known through blogging, social networks, shared research interests and so on, but never actually met in the flesh before. It was great chatting with Brian Fitzgerald, Jessica Coates and Rachel Cobcroft, as well as Elliot Bledscoe who I met a few weeks earlier, all of whom are part of the Creative Commons Australia team, which Brian leads. Given their enthusiasm and energy, I’m sure CC Australia has a lot going on in the future, and with any luck I’ll be involved with some of the CC and Education things as they emerge. I also chatted to Melissa Gregg, Jean Burgess and Axel Bruns, all of whom are blogosphere friends who its nice to see annually (or thereabouts) at conferences. Quite unexpectedly, I ran into Sarah Xu who I’ve met through local fannish events, but I hadn’t realised she’d landed in sunny BrisVegas to write her doctorate, which is creatively exploring the important question: “how can cyberfeminist practice and Web 2.0 applications be used to recode gendered representations of women on the Internet?” Sounds like a thesis worth watching!

Finally, a huge congratulations to Peter Black who put the conference together and assembled a fascinating group of people to participate in some really meaningful exchanges! Time to start planning for next year …

[Cross-posted from my main blog.]

Update: Peta Hopkins also has some notes from the Blogging in Education session, including a several things I’d forgotten we’d talked about (including ebublogs.org).

A couple of months ago I wrote about Virgin Mobile’s controversial use of CC-Licensed images from Flickr in one of their advertising campaigns.  Things have now taken an odd twist, with on of the teenagers features in the photos suing not just Virgin but Creative Commons as well!  As the Sydney Morning Herald reported:

A Texas family has sued Australia’s Virgin Mobile phone company, claiming it caused their teenage daughter grief and humiliation by plastering her photo on billboards and website advertisements without consent. [...] The picture of 16-year-old Chang flashing a peace sign was taken in April by Alison’s youth counsellor, who posted it that day on his Flickr page, according to Alison’s brother, Damon. In the ad, Virgin Mobile printed one of its campaign slogans, “Dump your pen friend,” over Alison’s picture. The ad also says “Free text virgin to virgin” at the bottom. [...]

The lawsuit, filed in Dallas late yesterday, names Virgin Mobile USA LLC, its Australian counterpart, and Creative Commons Corp, a Massachusetts nonprofit that licenses sharing of Flickr photos, as defendants. [...]

People who post photos on Flickr are asked how they want to license their attribution. The youth counsellor chose a sharing licence from Creative Commons that allows others to reuse work such as photos without violating copyright laws, if they credit the photographer and say where the photo was taken. His Flickr page appears at the bottom of the ad.

Worth reading on this matter are:-

[X] Lawrence Lessig’s post “On the Texas suit against Virgin and Creative Commons” (always thorough, Lessig also links to the actual complaint);
[X] The Slashdot Thread on the lawsuit;
[X] and Joi Ito’s post, in which he notes this complaint is a ”very good example of the complexities of copyright and other rights and the necessity of educating the public and ourselves about what copyright exactly is.”

Personally, I find it hard to credit the complaint against Creative Commons.  I think as an organisation, CC have done more to educate people about copyright than almost any other organisation.  While I admit using certain CC licenses leaves the lay-person ignorant about the complexities of model releases and the different international standards (ie you need people in the photos to grant permission for their image or likeness to be used), the fault lies more with copyright law per se than with Creative Commons.  Of course, given this development, it would seem prudent time for a more detailed guide about using CC licenses on Flickr (and other photos) to be developed.

[Cross-posted from my main blog.]

I’m at the Learning Futures Symposium today and tomorrow.  I’m not blogging summaries of sessions because, to be fair, that’s often quite dull.  However, I thought I’d take the opportunity to take the conference discussions to springboard some observations or thoughts that occurred during these interactions…

Insight #1: There is a reasonable amount of critical distance in terms of the ‘digital natives/digital immigrants’ rhetoric, but the same critical perspective doesn’t stretch to critiquing the idea of ‘web 2.0’.  Whereas ideas which supposedly encompass an entire generation are easy enough to pull apart, many educators seem wary of software and claims made about software as they acutely feel that this is one of the few areas in which students know more about this area than they do.  I suspect that if the same educators were dipping their toes in a little more they’d realise something commonsensical which seems to have entirely escaped these kind of conversations: that while there are many types of web 2.0 software, there are generic skills to be found in using these tools and platforms.  The reason that people can move from Friendster to MySpace to Facebook so easily, for example, is that at a basic level there is a lot of similarity between the way these platforms operate and the skills needed to use them.  Sure, the rate of new names of software can be overwhelming, but if we remember that a large section of the skills learnt using one social software platform are viable for the next, super-duper, upcoming must-have web 2.0 tool are transferable, that makes taking the time to learn and teach them a whole lot more important and palatable.  And social software platforms are just one example; skills in blogging, using wikis and many other forms of ‘web 2.0’ tools are similarly transferable and, at some level, generic.  Perhaps we should be focusing more on what those skills are.

Insight #2: Often the people in the driving position for educational policy aren’t confident to make decisions about ICT – nor should they be!

[Cross-posted from my main blog.]

The big news of the day is that The Australian Blogging Conference, a fabulous-looking free one-day event exploring everything about blogging in Australia (including education and Creative Commons!) now has a date: Friday, 28 September 2007 in sunny Brisbane! All of the details are here. I’d write more, but I’m now running around to see if I can get myself from Perth to Brisbane for the day of the conference!

Australia’s QUT has been in the grip of a very public controversy recently which dovetails between issues of freedom of speech, academic ethics and the transparency of university processes. The controversy came to light and media attention on 11 April this year when two QUT academics, John Hookham and Gary MacLennan, published an article in The Australian entitled ‘Philistines of relativism at the gates’. In it, Hookham and MacLennan very publicly took issue with the ethics of work being done by PhD candidate, Michael Noonan:

A time comes when you have to say: “Enough!”, when you can no longer put up with the misanthropic and amoral trash produced under the rubric of postmodernist, post-structuralist thought. The last straw, the defining moment, came for us when we attended a recent PhD confirmation at the Queensland University of Technology, where we teach. Candidate Michael Noonan’s thesis title was Laughing at the Disabled: Creating comedy that Confronts, Offends and Entertains. The thesis abstract explained that “Laughing at the Disabled is an exploration of authorship and exploitation in disability comedy, the culmination of which will be the creation and production (for sale) of a six-part comedy series featuring two intellectually disabled personalities. “The show, entitled (Craig and William): Downunder Mystery Tour, will be aimed squarely at the mainstream masses; its aim to confront, offend and entertain.” (Editor’s note: the subjects’ names have been changed to protect their privacy.) Noonan went on to affirm that his thesis was guided by post-structuralist theory, which in our view entails moral relativism. He then showed video clips in which he had set up scenarios placing the intellectually disabled subjects in situations they did not devise and in which they could appear only as inept. Thus, the disabled Craig and William were sent to a pub out west to ask the locals about the mystery of the min-min lights. [...]

At the seminar we were told there was a thin line between laughing at and laughing with. There is no such thin line. There is an absolute difference that anyone who has been laughed at knows. We must admit with great reluctance that at the seminar we were alone in our criticism of the project. For us, it was a moment of great shame and a burning testimony to the power of post-structuralist thought to corrupt. It is not our intention here to demolish the work of Noonan, an aspiring young academic and filmmaker. After all, ultimate responsibility for this research rests with the candidate’s supervisory team, which included associate professor Alan McKee, the faculty ethics committee, which apparently gave his project total approval, and the expert panel, which confirmed his candidacy. [...]

What we have instead is the reality that cultural studies is in the grip of a powerful movement that we call the radical philistine push. It is this same movement that has seen the collapse of English studies and the consequent production of graduates who have only the scantiest acquaintance with our literary heritage. It is also undermining the moral fabric of the university.

So, what starts with ethical questions about a particular thesis, quickly becomes a much more generic complaint about the corruption of education by poststructuralist and postmodern theory and approaches. I know nothing of the people writing or mentioned in this article, but have to say after reading the piece I wasn’t swayed; my sympathies were more with Michael Noonan than anyone else, because as a PhD candidate I know I would have been almost destroyed by such public denouncing of my work. This, I should add, is not a comment on the quality on the work being or proposed - I know nothing beyond the article above and the surrounding debate, and haven’t seen any of the footage mentioned - but rather a comment on the process and the reasonable expectation that any criticism of a candidate’s work be handled within the university as long as possible. I’m not saying there is never a case for ‘going public’ with dismay about certain research, but from what I’ve read I believe Hookham and MacLennan took that step far too early. More to the point, combining criticism of a specific project with a very generic attack on a particular body of theory and its influence on teaching seems a less than generous way of dealing with the work of a PhD candidate.

The issues raised here also beg serious questions about transparency and universities. There is a lot of talk about the need to transparency of research outcomes since (most) Australian universities are at least partially publicly-funded. I quite agree with that notion. However, I think the idea of the processes of a university being taken public under the rubric of transparency tend to skew what makes it into the public arena. Selectively releasing aspects of a process (such as an ethics review process and confirmation of candidature) around research which clearly relies on careful contextualisation is bound to produce a one-sided picture. Tellingly, when Hookham and MacLennan’s article was republished in Online Opinion, the were comments from a student - using the handle WWSBD - who’d had Noonan (the candidate) as a lecturer, praising his efforts to educate student about people with disability. Moreover, this is the only place I’ve seen Noonan himself comment publicly:

I am at the student at the centre of Hookham and MacLennan’s attacks.
I thank WWSBD for understanding and appreciating my work in its context. I appreciate the words of Anecdote, who understands that a work must be seen and placed in context before it should be attacked. And I am disappointed for bedwin, who has lost all respect for me on the basis of an uninformed and incorrect article.
Much has been assumed about my project, my integrity and my intentions. Very little of it is based on truth. The simple facts are these: the excerpts I showed at my PhD confirmation seminar were presented in the context of exploring and discussing issues of authorship and representation in disability. My project seeks to empower the disabled, to give them a voice through comedy. Each clip was prefaced with my own thoughts about whether or not this had been achieved.
As a sessional staff member at QUT, I can think of nothing more deplorable than attacking a student’s incomplete research in a public forum. Hookham and MacLennan have made no effort to read my PhD confirmation document (it was offered) and they rejected my attempts to meet and discuss their concerns.
To date I have not sought to respond to their attacks in print. But I refuse to be further bullied and vilified before the public, my peers and my students.

However, the story doesn’t end there. Earlier this month The Australian report that Hookham and MacLennan are now facing a disciplinary hearing at QUT for their public comments, with the university arguing that the two unfairly attacked the candidate and his supervisory team. Now, whatever their views, Hookham and MacLennan seem to have a reputation as inspirational teachers themselves, and the news of their censure galvanized some of the QUT student body to defend their actions on the basis of free speech. The student campaign is visible through it’s “Save Our Lecturers” MySpace page. Moreover, over at Martin Hirst’s blog, he has posted ‘Freedom of Speech disabled at QUT’ which points to this documentary which is now available at YouTube:

(Hirst is a friend of Hookham and MacLennan’s, and his post also contains the full text from Hookham and MacLennan’s original article in The Australian, as well as some additional commentary from The Australian and subsequent letters to editor.)

The YouTube documentary clip, by QUT student Adrian Strong, is very compelling; Hookham and MacLennan both come across as intelligent, compassionate teachers and academics who have good cause for concern. My point here is not to judge the debate being documented in this clip - although I imagine it would be extremely compelling for many people. Rather, in the era of participatory culture and digital media, this clip is indicative of a very profound change which can see debates and arguments that once would have remained closed suddenly being open to public viewing and public debate. In such an era, digital literacy is extremely important - the ability to create, edit and share such a clip is a key part of the ability to make a case in the public eye. It’s no surprise that QUT, which has Australia’s most renowned Creative Industries faculty, should be the source of the first such debate in Australia (to my knowledge, at least).

Illustrating my point, I just noticed another posted by the same YouTube user who posted the clip above (and thus, I presume, also be Adrian Strong) which talks in even stronger terms about a perceived campaign of censorship at QUT:

(Again, let me reinforce, I don’t know enough about the other things going on to really judge this debate, but I do know that the perception of censorship certainly doesn’t add to the reputation of any university. However, like the first clip, without any further rebuttal, this clip is likely to be very persuasive to viewers.)

[Cross-posted from TamaLeaver dot Net.]

As part of UWA’s Teaching Month (which, to be honest, is “Teaching 17 Days” but that just sounded naff on flyers and banners), the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences is running a group blog in which a number of academics, professional staff and at least one student are exploring the place of blogs and blogging in higher education. The blog is entitled Blogs: The New University Workspace? and so far topics that have been covered include:

• Writing and Thinking in Public
• Blogs and/as Digital Literacy?
• Multiliteracies for the digital era
• Of Students, Blogs, and Relevance

At this point, the bloggers would be absolutely delighted if anyone from the university community or beyond who has an opinion or thought about any of these topics could drop by the blog, have a read and, if you’ve time, leave a comment. We’re hoping that this can be one of those opportunities were a community of interest really does emerge!

Also, if you’re interested in following through on any of these ideas face to face, and you’re in Perth, staff and students across campus and beyond are invited to attend a Discussion Forum on Monday May 14th, from 12-2pm (including lunch) in Social Sciences Seminar room G2.08. The Forum will initially be led by those blogging in the Arts blog, but will be open to all ideas and opinions!

I hope to see you in the blog and, hopefully, face to face next Monday as well!

[Cross-posted from Tama Talk's Blogs.]

Next month the Centre for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning (CATL, where I work) will be launching a new magazine-length publiction called CATLyst which will focus on issues around learning and teaching in higher education. As part of the first issue, I’ve reviewed Open Content Licensing, a new book put out by the Australian arm of the Creative Commons organisation. It’s pitched at a generalist audience (hence half the review really explaining why CC exists), but I thought it might be of interest to some blog reading folks anyway. Here we go…

Brian Fitzgerald (ed.), Open Content Licensing: Cultivating the Creative Commons, Sydney, Sydney University Press, 2007, $A26.95, ISBN: 9781920898519

Issues of copyright, intellectual property, fair dealing (to use the Australian term) or fair use (to use the American term) have huge importance in education and academia. Most academics have a foot in at least two camps, as a producer of intellectual property in the form of articles, software, patented means to produce material goods, and as an educator who needs to display, quote, demonstrate and play work done by others in the processes of teaching and encouraging student learning. Students equally need to have a very clear picture of what they can do with the intellectual property of others – otherwise lack of understanding can lead to plagiarism or copyright violation – but increasingly so, students are also producers of creative and intellectual works, both in print and multi-media forms, which fall under the auspices of copyright control in one shape or another.

It is widely acknowledged that the era of digital media has presented very real challenges to the legal and conceptual understandings of copyright law, exemplified by the debates about the primarily illegal downloading of music and films. However, as educators seek new ways to enhance learning, students are often being asked to create short films, image-laden slide presentations or construct websites. More to the point, students often find that while they can use certain material within an educational context, they cannot use the exact same presentation or production as part of a portfolio when seeking employment, because different copyright rules apply outside of the university context. What, then, is the best way to equip students – and academics – with the tools and understanding about what can and cannot be used in such presentations and productions? The monolith of copyright law tends to have two extremes: full copyright, which allows little re-use, if any; and items in the public domain, regarding which creators have had to relinquish any and all rights. However, in the past few years a number of organisations and initiatives have sought to find a middle path between these two extremes, and the most notable of these in Australia is explored in Open Content Licensing: Cultivating the Creative Commons.

Open Content centres on the Australian arm of the Creative Commons organisation, whose primary purpose is to allow creators to explicate their intended copyright. For example, using a Creative Commons license, creators may explicitly state that a work can be used as long as Attribution of the original authorship is given, and only in a non-commercial manner (this is but one of many possible ‘some rights reserved’ configurations). For educational purposes, such licensing is extremely useful as it means with proper citation these works could be used by students and academics alike both within and beyond educational contexts, without copyright violation (as long as no money is directly made in the process).

Open Content is edited by Brian Fitzgerald, Head of Queensland University of Technology’s Law School, who is also the chair of the Creative Commons organisation in Australia. The collection is based on a late 2005 conference which launched the Australian versions of the Creative Commons licenses and brought together local academics, producers and others, including Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford Law Professor, who began the Creative Commons organisation and, until recently, was also chairperson. The articles in Open Content range from the broad and philosophical, to those with a narrow focus on specific issues in production or distribution. For academics and for students, many articles provide important guidance about laws in Australia and specific ways Creative Commons licensing can be used in education. While it might be odd for many people to hear the head of a Law School talking about videogames, one of the most interesting articles is Brian Fitzgerald talking about ‘machinima’, which entails videos created using the virtual landscapes of videogames rather than the material world. In exploring who owns such productions, and who can share them, Fitzgerald makes a point which, broadly, summarises the issues and the value of Open Content to readers:

By recognising that copyright law should exist not only to protect investment in the production of intellectual property, but also encourage further creativity, innovation and social interaction, a balance can be sought which both protects game developers from piracy, and also protects the rights of players to play, and the ability of players to express themselves, inside and outside of games. [228]

The book is available in hardcopy, but in keeping with the Creative Commons philsophy, indivudual chapters are also available, free of charge, from the University of Sydney’s eScholarship Repository.