Riley On Teaching As Scholarship and the Commons
Continuing a conversation started by “Open Source and Academia,” an article co-authored by Laurie Taylor and Brendan Riley, Brendan responds to a blog post written by ruffin, that in itself is, in part, a response to the Taylor and Riley article. Among the smart things Brendan writes is this:
But as the MIT OpenCourseWare program suggests, the course materials do not make the course. We learned from Good Will Hunting that all we need for a college education is a library card, right? Maybe if you’re a Southie. Instead, as Alex Reid suggested a while ago on Digital Digs, what students are paying for in higher ed is time: time with an expert, time to discuss and ponder, time with someone trained in both the depth of the discipline and a set of tools to help groups of people think through ideas in a productive way. This is the reason online education has not become the boon administrators thought it would be: you have to staff online courses with people who know what they’re doing, and they need time to do it. Wikipedia makes not only high school research projects nearly worthless (”write a report on dolphins and fishing”), but endangers lecture classes in the same way.
Thus, the concern that someone might sell my syllabus is a limited one, to me–particularly since every syllabus I’ve written is online and CCd, but that’s beside the point. I could see feeling a little chagrined if someone started making bucketloads of money from them, but ultimately my teaching materials are another form of my scholarship–they’re what I’m contributing back to the commons. And our culture is so wedded to the idea that we own our ideas that the idea of losing control of those ideas makes us revolt. [Read more.]
Center for Social Media at American University’s Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video
Martine Courant Rife points to and discusses the Center for Social Media at American University’s Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video.
Copyright Crash Course
Via academicHacK, a the University of Texas Libraries’ Copyright Crash Course.
Responses to Helprin’s Bad Idea
In an OpEd piece in the NYT, Mark Helprin argues for perpetual copyright. In addition to the two responses If:Book points to (Lessing’s wiki-based collective response and David Rothman’s excellent critique), I want to draw attention to Bob Blechman’s musings on what a retroactive perpetual copyright might mean for him.
I’d like to believe no one would take Helprin seriously, but I’m worried that far too many people will.
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