If you are going to license music, which is not a bad idea if you are using it for projects, support the little guys at Friendly Music. After all, you're probably a small indie yourself, otherwise your lawyers and publicity agents would be dealing with all this for you.
Apparently a use of the word "moderated" I have never heard before.
"If a level is found to be in violation of the EULA it will be moderated," said the game's senior community development manager in a forum response. "We're moving towards a system where additional information is given, however for the time being if you don't want your level moderating avoid anything unsuitable for users of all ages and copyright content."
Perhaps Sony needs a dictionary. I mean, I would hope they moderate all levels of LittleBigPlanet, and not just the questionable ones. Otherwise how will they be able to assess which ones to ban?
On the other hand, they probably mean the same thing when they tell people they will take their complaints under "consideration." Oh wait, someone claiming to be from Sony is at the door and wants me to step out back so they can "explain" something to me ... brb.
[via Wired]
Woohoo, I say, woohoo!
In RiP: A remix manifesto, Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers.
via boingboing
I admit, I am sort of posting these in reverse order, as I sort through old e-mail. I think this is the one that started it all. At least I can't find anything earlier, though I know there was. I think the original was just a sentence or two complaining about poorly timed discoveries of policy changes whose nature didn't help anything really.
The problem here is a conflation between intellectual property rights and usage rights. (Somebody find the legal advisor for the faculty union and kick them in the kneecaps for that one ... I mean, just what the school needs: structured balkanization spelled out in the faculty contract.)
By creating content for the school on the school's payroll for the teaching of these courses, the faculty are giving a certain measure of license to the school, which in order to protect copyright should of course be limited to usage rights. But to forbid even usage rights without explicit permission in each specific instance makes it much more difficult to maintain consistency between courses and thus will most probably wreak havoc with accreditation next time it comes around.
Not to mention the issue of something like [course number], where by not being able to copy shells over you are in effect saying I don't have the right to my own content because someone else has been teaching it in the interim.
The to avoid this I would ask the faculty at the next faculty meeting if they would be willing to sign voluntary waivers allowing all faculty to share information with each other in the department openly to ensure course consistency between sections. Furthermore, I would also ensure that there is always an active copy of a version as developed by the faculty of record for that course with documentation on file that the shell can be copied as needed so that new faculty and adjuncts can acquire a working shell when picking up new courses.
Yep, continuing saga.
Here I make some assertions of what happened and why. I did not pull these out of the air to justify my reasoning. I was there for the arguments before the policy change was implemented (I was away while it was implemented), and those were the points people were making.
And yes, I did have my knickers in a twist while writing these. Whether appropriate or not. No one likes to be told one week before the beginning of a semester: oh, we don't share course content between faculty anymore, you're on your own for course development.
Since when have I not ruffled feathers? Though I have found it is hard to ruffle feathers of people who are secure in the knowledge they have made a wise decision (even, in fact, if that security is entirely delusional ... it is a matter of comfort, not correctness).
What happened is this.
The school, in order to promote people creating online course content make a rather draconian rule on intellectual property. This was done because the school is severely balkanized and many faculty are firmly convinced that were they to put their content online the school would immediately claim it as their own. (Which in fact, the school could not do unless the faculty specifically signed a contract stating they were signing away their rights.)
The reason for this was that this approach, even though it fosters increased paranoia and creates increased friction between faculty, especially full-time faculty and adjuncts, is because it is much easier to do this than it is for a system so entrenched in its own animosity toward itself to work on effective community building. As such, it was meant as a politically expeditious ruling (a bribe as it were) to get people to sign on, rather than taking the time to work with them to address the underlying issues creating such mutual distrust.
The key problem in the approach is that it conflates usage rights with ownership rights to the detriment of communication, serving the student population, and general effective pedagogy by reducing the amount of contact and sharing of knowledge between faculty.
Being an instructor is not about "mine, mine, mine" but about service to the student population. The same is true of being in school administration.
In other words, from the perspective of placating those who function from a stance of distrust of the intent of the administration and of fellow faculty members, it makes perfect sense, but that doesn't make it good policy. Rather it is a necessary evil because people don't seem to want to do what it takes to establish a sense of community and the corresponding effective communications.
In order to institute such a policy sensibly, it is important that a clearly defined and centralized process be in place to deal with the distribution and sharing of information for the purpose of ensuring content equity and consistency between sections of the same class. This must not rely on faculty scrambling at the last second to contact prior instructors for the right to borrow materials from their shells. Especially since it will most likely occur at times in the year when faculty are not regularly checking their e-mail.
To set the policy with no structured way of navigating through it means we are tossing academic integrity out the window in favor of pandering to paranoia, self-interest, and learning to distrust each other because every faculty member is just a criminal waiting to happen. Which is exactly the sort of thing people should get their feathers ruffled about.
For instance, a simple Excel spreadsheet listing by course of who has developed content for what that is only used to indicate when faculty specifically do not want to share their content, and a simple process (like e-mail reminders once a semester for change requests) to keep them up to date. There should also be standard shells from the faculty of record which other instructors are allowed to diverge from but are encouraged to start with.
If you are the only person teaching course X, then yes, you can jealously guard it all you want, but when there are four full time faculty and six adjuncts all teaching sections of the same course, then such an approach becomes more than slightly problematic.
[A snipped section of discussing just how few people I complained about this to, all listed by name.]
So yeah, it is poorly thought out approach beyond serving its tangential goals and as such I will complain about it. Doesn't mean I don't understand it, just don't agree with it.
The continuing saga of what happens when, after being tenured, you forget that adjunct faculty don't have freedom of speech.
I thought I would post some of my original e-mails, so people can see what got me canned. And names have been changed to protect the innocent. This was in reply to another faculty member who sounded a little annoyed (and definitely patronizing) that I would ask for a copy of their shell. I should point out that the course is question, though I never taught it, is one I was responsible for developing and pushing through curriculum committee. So yeah, I was a little indignant myself.
You can tell I go into academic-speak when annoyed.
Moot point. The section was canceled again only about two days after it was opened.
But in fact, I don't think I should be developing my own work. Nor should you. Nor should anyone else. Either people should be working collaborative to develop the course materials, or a faculty of record should take the lead in developing the course materials and other faculty should be expected to toe the line to some degree. I prefer the former, though the latter is bureaucratically easier.
Otherwise accreditation issues involving consistency across sections becomes a nightmare as there is no effective way to ensure consistency of academic quality across sections. Consistency needs to happen in the process of development, not be evaluated after the fact. Such a gap is a grave disservice to the students.
Not to mention, why would any of us volunteer to increase our workload like that, with all of us duplicating each other's work?
In any event, I changed my mind on asking for shell copies from other faculty so that I might instead put my shells out there under clearly indicated Creative Comments Attribution - Share Alike licenses. Which means that a.) anyone else can use my work for their classes without having to ask for my permission (it is implicit in the license), and b.) must do so under the same license.
Because I simply refuse to fear my fellow faculty and treat them as potential thieves before even getting out of the starting gate. The idea of "mine, mine, mine" has no place in a robust educational structure. By hoarding our own works we are compromising a quality education in favor of simple greed and/or paranoia. I just don't buy this individually-tailored balkanization stuff.
And by structuring it this way, the school know has a valid argument on why to never compensate anyone for course development. This is, of course, ignoring the fact that even the meager adjunct rate is roughly 3 times the hourly rate when compared to classroom hours, which is to say or 1/3 for class, 1/3 for grading, 1/3 for development ... check the math yourself if you doubt me ... hourly rate is around $20 for emergency substitution in a class, adjunct compensation rate is around $60 for classroom hour). So yes, you are in fact getting compensated for developing the course as part of the payment for the course. This is also why the credit-free courses often pay different rates based on the expected amount of development required.
Okay, another chapter on the politics of academe and what I said to lose me an adjunct position at a school where I had previously held tenure for a period of time.
As a recap:
4 -- Copy to the Check
3 -- Open Source College Textbooks
2 -- Copy to the Door
1 -- Copy to the Left, Copy to the Right
I want to make a bold pronouncement here.
Intellectual property rights are bad for education.
Now, let me be the first one to say they are important, and even necessary. They certainly benefit the owners of the intellectual property.
The problem is that they can negatively impact the quality of education.
So let's start at first principles ... what is education? Well, it is the system of educating others, for helping to grow and develop and to give them the knowledge they need to function in some context or another. From the general context of a well-rounded public education to the specific contexts that one finds in Ph.D. programs and technology training programs. (Okay, I can't believe I just put those two on an equal footing in the same sentence either.)
So it is the sharing of knowledge. The knowledge, at least in the dumbed-down super-simplistic model, flows from the instructor to the students. This means that, by definition, education is about the sharing of knowledge so that others can take it and make use of it.
Intellectual property is, on the other hand, about the protection of knowledge, preventing others from using it without express permission of the author / originator. And already you begin to see the problem. Even if, by teaching a class, the instructor has implicitly agreed to allow students to use the knowledge they have chosen to structure in a particular way in its presentation, there is already a slippery slope where students have to worry about what portions of what they have learned they are and are not allowed to use beyond the confines of the originating classroom.
Fortunately, that can be resolved with the original research concept, where students are supposed to go beyond their instructors and further the realm of knowledge, either through day to day application or through the creation of new intellectual properties. It may still be a minefield of legal pitfalls, but at least it comes with a map and a clearly marked exit. (This is only a problem when different instructors give you contradictory maps and insist you use theirs to the exclusion of all others.)
But really, instructors assume students are going to make use of what they are taught, so that is a pretty weak opposition to intellectual property. The problem is that it is only the tip of the iceberg. It is what we see, and what we think of as education. But as with the iceberg, most of what education is exists below the waterline, beyond the classroom.
In order to educate, instructors must educate themselves. They must then document what they have learned in order to educate others. That process of documentation is the point at which new intellectual property is generated.
There are two ways in which instructors can educate themselves. One is by locking themselves away with the works of others and hunting for answers. The other is communicating with other instructors and sharing ideas and works to build something that works.
This is where intellectual property law throws a wrench in the machine.
Although many instructors, at least at the university level, are happy to collaborate on research, they seem significantly less happy to collaborate of pedagogy. Thus you hear endless horror stories from college adjuncts having opportunities to teach a class only to find all three full-time faculty have entirely different syllabi, outlines, and expectations from the course and none of them are willing to share any of the actual course materials unless they are teaching canned courses purchased by the school. This can inspire many an adjunct aspiring to be a tenured faculty member some day to go into private industry instead. Especially the competent ones.
This is a problem.
What it means is there is no quality assurance between sections of the class, no collaboration between faculty to find weaknesses and strengths in each other's work, and large quantities of duplicated effort (every second of which is agonizingly complained about) as each faculty member strives to reinvent the wheel. Practical upshot: Two students taking the same course at the same institution with two different instructors have no guarantee of having the opportunity to learn the same material at the same levels of depth and breadth.
Moreover, with each faculty member striving to reinvent the wheel we find many faculty end up opting for lowest-common-denominator education because there just isn't enough time to do that really good job they all secretly want to do. (Academics are rabid perfectionists, otherwise they wouldn't put up with what they put up with to do what they do.) It also creates dismay among faculty who would like to be spending more time doing research and less time doing course prep. Admittedly, more an issue for junior faculty not teaching things they have taught for 20 years, but those are also the ones trying to establish a publications record, be a good institutional citizen, and get tenure.
So, and I wish I could say this is purely hypothetical, intellectual property rights in the academic setting leads to inconsistent and mediocre educational quality. The places that avoid this are the ones that actively encourage (if not mandate) sharing between faculty.
In order for education to be truly successful, instructors need to actively and freely share their course materials and ideas with one another to ensure consistency across courses and sections. This would reduce their work loads, provide initial support networks for adjuncts and new faculty, and strengthen pedagogy through simple peer review.
Sharing is critical to education. There is no room for "mine, mine, mine" in the pedagogical frame. It needs to be about "we" and "us" and, most importantly, about students. It is not about egos. Okay, the problem is that it is about egos, and it shouldn't be.
The current trends in attitudes toward intellectual property are giving us educators who feel that the resources they have created for learning are tools from them to profit from and not tools to help others to learn. I am not entirely sure the two are commensurable.
This needs to change.
This doesn't mean that faculty members need to do the same with all their research, just with their course materials. Independent research, as well as being a tool to further knowledge, is rather openly a tool for personal gain on the part of the researcher. Otherwise why give up having a life in order to spend all that time on a topic maybe 1% of the world has any interest in, if you're lucky. That works better through collaboration too, but what I am talking about with course materials is open and unfettered sharing, not unlike MIT does with its course materials.
Okay, in my next rant on the topic, I will take a stab at how it can change and some if the ideas we need to think about in order to make sharing palatable for the greedy and the paranoid (alas, a common breed among underpaid, overworked, entirely stressed out academics).
Okay, I said I was going to write about my being summarily dismissed for speaking my mind, if a little adamantly, and have been dragging my feet.
Perhaps, in part, because I just lost my steam. Perhaps, in part, because I think getting fired for speaking my mind is a feather in my cap. Perhaps, in part, because there are so many other interesting things in this world. But I suppose that what I want to say is important, and I need to say it.
So allow me to start with an easy one (in terms of not going on a tirade for the next few hours) and make a truly controversial statement regarding education:
Most faculty who say they are not compensated for developing course content on their own time are, to put it simply, lying.
I know, an amazing thing for a professor to profess. But it is, alas, true.
Are they knowingly lying? Probably not. They probably firmly believe this to be true. But firmly believing something to be true doesn't make it so. More commonly it means one is deceived, deluded, or lying to one's self. To put it more gently, it is a self serving argument with no foundation in reality.
Here is how people's mind's work on this topic:
I am getting paid $nn thousand dollars a year to teach. However, this is a salary and is not earmarked out between class time, grading time, and development time. Since this is not being spelled out, and there is nothing elsewhere in my contract specifically saying that part of my compensation relates to developing course content for course, I am therefore not getting compensated for my course development work.
Does anyone see the problem with this line of reasoning?
I hope so.
If you don't, let me give a concrete example. Note that the numbers are intentionally altered to protect the innocent, but they are close enough for rock and roll.
Let's take a woefully underpaid adjunct faculty member, like I almost was.
Let's say I earn $875 per credit hour for each course I teach. That is 15 weeks of a one hour class commitment, but the external supporting work. A meager sum for the amount of work involved, which is usually at least two hours of desk work for every hour of class time, or a minimum of 45 hours divided into 850, means it is under $20 an hour. Not a terrible salary, but certainly low for a professional field inhabited by people whose student loans debts are second only to doctors.
Now, at the same school, as a full-time faculty member, if I am asked to sit in on a class for another faculty member, I will get $25 for that hour, on top of my normal salary. Now, if we multiply that by the same 15 hours, we get $375. So that is $375 for 15 hours of class time, versus $875 for, ummm, 15 hours of class time. So what is that other $500 for again? Said it above, work outside of class, including course development and grading. And that is for lowly adjuncts. The faculty earn anywhere from a little more to significantly more than that.
Undercompensated perhaps, but not uncompensated. A critical difference. It is the difference between doing something for less than you think it is worth versus doing something for free. Being undercompensated may make us feel like we are uncompensated, but that doesn't make it so.
Why is this relevant? Well, when I asked if I could borrow course materials from another faculty member, they lectured me on how I should be doing my own work because they weren't getting paid for developing the course materials, so why should they share them?
Well, ignoring the fact that the course was originally mine before I left said school ...
In any event, all schools should always require as terms of their faculty being hired that
Though some schools do exactly this already, those are, almost unbelievably, heretical assertions for many faculty at schools that don't. But there is a very good reason for them, and I don't mean because that way the school covers its legal butt. To put it simply, sharing is important to education, in fact it is critical. Hiding your work under a rock and hoarding it to yourself is not an effective way to educate, to learn, or to grow. We will start to address that next time, because, well, that is the entire point of this.
Open source college textbooks, from slashdot.
Original artical in the L.A. Times.
Oooh, and bribes for not going to the open-source side from publishers desperate to push overpriced products.
You too can sign the statement to make textbooks afforfable by taking advantage of open source resources.
And check out the following resources. Even better, contribute.
And let me end with some interesting thoughts on money ... from Princeton via the Japan Times.
The most wonderful thing about the Internet is finding out how many other people share your point of view when you're in a funk and feel like a lone voice in the wilderness.
You know, after having been a tenured professor for a period, and then, after some time away returning as adjunct faculty, I overlooked an important point.
Just because adjuncts are accorded intellectual property rights does not mean they are also accorded civil rights. Especially that one involving speech.
The probably didn't like the bit about how hoarding intellectual property instead of developing it collaboratively and sharing it with everyone in the school is inimical to effective pedagogy. All it does is duplicate everyones work load and breed inconsistencies between course sections.
I would be downright enraged if it weren't for the fact that the most energetic response I could muster was "Well, that's going to be inconvenient." Perhaps because it was not only a paycheck, but a meager paycheck that would bring in just enough to allow be to avoid hunting for a real job, or even better starting a new career path.
Yep, yep, you all probably guessed by now that I was canned for speaking my mind about a policy I had issues with. I mean, ignoring the fact that I probably just plain have issues, and my e-mails can be most flame-ridden. Still, no discussion, no counter-arguments, just shut up. Policy should not be questioned and therefore there is nothing to discuss apparently.
I will still be posting my arguments on the topic. After all, I have time to give them even more thought now.
So if anyone needs a firebrand (in the proper geeky sense of effective communication through sniping, harping, bickering, and flaming) who is a social theorist and annoyingly intuitive programmer (don't ask me what I just did, I don't know, it just sort of happened, but it works), you know where to reach me. Looks like my real-life alter ego will be hitting the job boards this week. Well ... next week. I am still wrapping up some summer work this week.
P.S. -- On the intuitive programming. I mean that. I can write code I can no longer understand seconds after I've put it to pixel. It just sort of flows out, like automatic writing. It is usually preceded by my complaining about how finding and easy and elegant solution to the problem, or any solution at all, will be impossible. A little freaky at times. But I only worry when I start to dream as code ... no, not of code, or in code, but as code. Ummm, it's sort of like being an airplane ticket. Not that that probably helps any.
Had a most interesting if rather galling experience recently.
I had the opportunity to pick up some distance learning courses at a school where I used to teach to offset a little underemployment. All courses I have taught before, one of which I wrote myself from scratch.
So I went into the online course shells and found them blank.
So I did what I did every semester I had been teaching there and asked about having the master shell from a prior semester copied over (usually just an active shell from a faculty of record, though they were getting master shells set up). I was told they couldn't do that without the express permission of the person who created that course, even though one of them was my own course and most probably still quite derivative thereof. This was new. Annoying, but new.
So I complained to the few key people about the apparent poor implementation of a rule, the conflation of ownership and usage right, and the need for departments to clarify and track who does and does not want to share so that no one has to scramble to track down owners (especially if resigned, deceased, or otherwise indisposed). I also sent out e-mails asking everyone who had taught the course last semester or was teaching it this semester if I might have a copy of the course materials for the online shell. My hopes were not high because it was two weeks before the beginning of the semester. How many full-time faculty are answering their e-mail at that time?
The responses to date, though few in number, have been most stunning. A few faculty have actually become offended that I would have the temerity to ask to use the materials *they* had developed for *their* classes. One replied with a bit of jovial condescension that reeks of that academic arrogance that will some day drive me out of academe. And more importantly, my department chair got an angry call from the administration for my having the gall to question the academic integrity of this rule which was not set by the administration, but by the Faculty Association itself. To their defense, I was probably overreacting a little, when it is now one week out and I suddenly discover I have to create three courses from scratch.
My former office mate (old classrooms split into faculty cubicles), who has also taught the course I developed did offer me his copy, but we couldn't find a version of it in the online archives, and others have taught it since then.
This is a large school and the courses are entry level. One of the courses has ten different faculty members teaching sections this Fall. So it is not an issue of one person controlling the course and being jealous of a section farmed out to an adjunct. Moreover, as I noted above, one of the courses I have been refused a copy of is one I created myself and openly shared with any faculty who were teaching it. I would even mirror it on a public Web site so that the information was not locked away in proprietary course management software. It is this last element that really got me miffed.
I should point out that to date no one has replied with any counter arguments to my arguments beyond the administration telling my chair to shut me up, which does not, so far as I recall, qualify as a reasoned response.
So, rather than going on a tirade here, I am going to itemize my arguments over a series of postings. Suffice to say for now it revolves around conflating ownership rights and usage rights and the problem of faculty failing to communicate and share resources in order to ensure academic integrity and continuity between course sections. It seems the school has everyone jealously doing and hoarding their own work, thus increasing the workload of all faculty due to duplication of effort, and selling it to them as a benefit for them, at the cost of both the growth that comes from the interaction of ideas and minds and of the potential quality of education being provided to the students.
Hope that threat is enough to egg you on to read through the rest of the series. It is goign to be mixed with other things. I still have over a week of stuff queued up to post. I've had to step up to twice a day to get through it all.
For my own part, I have stopped asking for copies of the online materials from anyone and am rewriting the courses from scratch (Did I mention I was underemployed this Fall? Okay, and I found an archived copy of my old course that still uses the same texts, complete with all support materials ... which is good because I had to fight tooth and nail to get the publisher to provide me with a Mac-compatible version thereof.) with a specifically stated Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license on all materials. That means my permission to copy the course materials into new sections is inscribed right in the documents, and it means that permission to copy course materials and any derivatives thereof remains with any copies made. May ruffle a few feathers, but it is an approach that has just recently survived its day in court, so I intend to stick with it.
Last time I checked, being and educator is about sharing knowledge. I know a bunch of people who are getting copies of Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten this Christmas. Or maybe The Missing Piece.
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