Tama’s eLearning Blog

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.

Microsoft Australia have a new promotional offer and new website - http://www.itsnotcheating.com.au/ - pitching Office 2007 at Australian university students. As The Age notes:

Microsoft sells the premium version of its new Office 2007 software suite for $1150, but in a new promotion it is offering the package to Australian university students for just $75. The almost 95 per cent discount for Office 2007 Ultimate is offered through a website made specifically for the promotion, itsnotcheating.com.au. It comes as Microsoft’s cash-cow office productivity suite - which has more than 400 million users worldwide and accounts for about 30 per cent of the software giant’s income - is being increasingly threatened by free alternatives. Most notable is OpenOffice, but there are also a number of web-based competitors such as Google’s Docs & Spreadsheets and Zoho Office. [...] When asked why the discount was not being offered to TAFE or non-tertiary students, a Microsoft spokeswoman said: “Microsoft has targeted universities in the roll out of this three month pilot program. If the program is successful, we will look at extending the offer to TAFE students as well as K-12.”

In many ways this is a clever strategic move by Microsoft to ensure that the university students of today - and leaders of tomorrow - are thinking Microsoft when they move out of the universities. It certainly speaks to the competition coming from other options - I must admit I’m musing Google Docs more and more as their export to PDF function makes editing documents intended for the web far faster than using Word and the Acrobat plugin.

Microsoft are also try to tap the web2.0 world of blogging:

Microsoft hopes to spread the word about its offer virally by running a blogging competition, and the first prize is a Vespa GT200 scooter. “All you have to do is mention the word ‘Office’ and the link ‘www.itsnotcheating.com.au’ in your blog,” the website reads. “Winner is judged on creativity of the story.”

Of course, there is real potential for that competition to turn against Microsoft, especially when students find their new spiffy formats of Word aren’t compatible with previous versions. Then again, perhaps someone at Microsoft is either feeling ironic this week - or is rather ignorant about Microsoft’s ongoing anti-piracy war - as this ‘cool’ list appears on the competition page of the It Not Cheating website:

So … “It’s not cheating if … you don’t get caught.” That’s certainly not the message my university wants to send. Nor, I suspect, it is what Microsoft really wants to say. Rather, in the push for blogging credibility, Microsoft haven’t thought through their own campaign! It may be intended as satirical, but I suspect most people will find these attempts at being hip rather ironic!

Update (1.35pm, Tues 6 Mar 07): Long Zheng has a more robust argument about why this Microsoft initiative is a bad idea here. (Of course, all those criticisms aside, I have to admit: were I currently a student without a copy of Office, I’m pretty sure I’d be looking to get myself a $75 legal copy tomorrow!)

[Cross-posted from my brand new personal blog!]

Flickr just upgraded from Beta to Gamma so I thought it was time to check their search function out in the new version. Low and behold, my wish for a better way to search only Creative Commons licensed images is there: Now when directing students to the various legally re-usable sources for image on the web I can start with Flick and ensure that they can easily find only images with the right licenses! Spiffy!

In a BBC news article today, there’s a discussion of cheating, plagiarism and its changing nature in digital culture:

Technological solutions alone will not be enough to prevent children using the internet to cheat in their coursework, a government adviser has said. Professor Jean Underwood of Nottingham Trent University says it is up to teachers and parents to show that plagiarism is inappropriate. [...] Professor Underwood said technology could help ameliorate the problem but was “no quick fix”. She said software already existed to help schools ascertain whether work was the pupil’s own. “It can even be as simple as typing a phrase into Google.” “If a phrase has been plagiarised, sites will bring it up.” [...] Professor Underwood said some software could check as well as mark work. But she said some clever students would find ways round such programmes. [...] “We need to think smart on an academic and technological level,” she said “The internet is a wonderful thing with the power to change lives - but there will always be a downside.”

While I gather the article and the survey is describes are aimed at primary and secondary education more so than tertiary level, I do think the general philosophy of teachers, educators, parents and anyone else who is part of the learning process(es) taking some responsibility to teach students and learners that plagiarism is wrong is extremely important in ensuring the upcoming generations don’t have a far less developed ethical approach to plagiarism, (mis)appropriation and cheating.

In the last couple of years I’ve taught several courses which have looked a digital culture and had a sizable online presence. From those I’ve found these three strategies can be useful in increasing student awareness of the ethical (and practical) dimensions of citation and the problems of plagiarism:

[1] Talk About It In Every Course - Sometimes I’ve found that students simply don’t have enough conversations about plagiarism. Many academics presume that students already know what’s ethical and what’s not, especially in the second, third and later years of a university degree. For various reasons, some students will not understand what plagiarism is and why it’s wrong (especially when the rhetoric around the tertiary system is often phrased in economic terms - “in purely financial terms, doesn’t using existing work mean I can finish my degree faster and get a job” might be the thoughts of some students!). Having a conversation about the expectations of the course in the first tutorial/seminar/class session which includes flagging the unacceptable nature of cheating/plagiarism is important. If possible, it’s worth setting aside enough time to make this a real conversation - put the right questions/starting points on the table and students will almost always come to the conclusions that cheat/plagiarise are wrong themselves!

[2] If Get Students to Post Their Material Online and Discuss The Copyright Status of Their Work - In the cases where a course has a public and visible online presence, I’ve found it important to discuss what should and shouldn’t be in a university course blog in some detail with them before students start posting (especially since many of them are familiar with different experiences of blogging from personal and social blogs). An especially useful part of the conversation can be when students consider how they would like their online posts and their online writing to be protected. Starting from a student-centric perspective can make issues of ownership, ethics and plagiarism much closer to home, and increase an awareness of why these issues matter. While I’m not a huge fan of speaking the tongues of legality, I’ve found the practicality of using some sort of official copyright license on university blogs quite important. Moreover, working out which license in conjunction with students can be an extremely fruitful process. For example, the Self.Net tutorial blogs all used a Creative Commons which works on the ‘Some Rights Reserved’ principle (letting you work somewhere in the spectrum between the absolutes of the public domain and full copyright). The specific license used was Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 which has these stipulations:

Attribution. You must give the original author credit.
Non-Commercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a licence identical to this one.

In a nutshell, this license was the legal equivalent of the ethical guidelines students agreed upon when discussing plagiarism and responsibility in the first tutorials and thus makes their decision far more clear when it has a legal form as well. These licenses also explicitly flag two more important things: (a) that students actually own their work, something often not made clear and (b) that other students, courses, universities, individuals, self-learners, etc. are explicitly welcome to build upon and re-use the work of students in this course and that agreement is presented with a legal mechanism which basically enshrines the anti-plagiarism practices academia has cherished for centuries (ie it’s about ensuring creditation as they key thing!). Thus students also start to consider their work in the spectrum of learning materials online, too (and self-awareness of their sometimes rushed efforts can help them bring a more critical perspective when examining other online sources!).

[3] Write Assessment That Illustrates the Continuity Between Online and Offline Sources - For example, in my Self.Net course last year, as the first minor assignment (worth 20% of the course mark), my colleague Jane Long and I came up with the notion of a Critical Annotated Webliography. That is, an annotated bibliography of exclusively online sources. In order to focus the webliographies, I wrote four hypothetical questions, and then asked student to write an annotated bibliography of online source that they would use if they were to answer the essay question (but they were not actually required to answer the hypothetical question, just describe how they would’ve gone about it). This assessment piece ensured that the critical skills students bring to offline/ print sources in books and so forth was also brought along when addressing online sources. One of the bigger issues still seems to be that students (and some educators) treat online sources as if they need different critical skills (and, more often than not, less critical skills) to analyse. While new media such as Flash animations certainly need media-specific analyses, when an item online is text or just a PDF or html page, then the same critical skills can be brought to bear as would be regarding offline sources. This is an extremely obvious point, but one many students need a helping hand to make. In Self.Net I found the Webliographies were never successful in discussing and understanding these issues, and student feedback suggests it was a successful method to engage with the ethical and practical issues surrounding online sources. (For a few good examples, feel free to take a look at Hourann’s Webliography, Carley’s Webliography or Dani’s Webliography which were written in the second half of 2004).

Incidentally, while I do understand that in time-constrained teaching environments, there’s something useful about plagiarism-detection being automated, I nevertheless have huge issues with institution level plagiarism detection systems like TurnItIn.com. In my view this is (a) treating the symptom, not the cause and (b) treating students as if we expect them to cheat. While I might be living in a utopian bubble, I still believe that it’s the educator’s job to ensure a philosophy and ethics in students which will see them choose not to plagiarised and if plagiarism is occurring I would also like to think the educators are clued in enough to be able to spot it in their areas of expertise.