Group items tagged

7. PLN vs. PLE

6. Open Viewers MUVEs for the plebes

5. MOOCS - Massive Online Open Courses

4. Whisper of Green

3. Bring on the research

2. Unleashing The Tribe: small passionate communities Ewan McIntosh

1. Death of ‘T’ruth and the killer app

technical know-how is not enough. We must also be adept at negotiating, planning, and nurturing the conversation with others we may know little about -- not to mention maintaining a healthy balance between our face-to-face and virtual lives (another dance for which kids sorely need coaching).

The Collaboration Age comes with challenges that often cause concern and fear. How do we manage our digital footprints, or our identities, in a world where we are a Google search away from both partners and predators? What are the ethics of co-creation when the nuances of copyright and intellectual property become grayer each day? When connecting and publishing are so easy, and so much of what we see is amateurish and inane, how do we ensure that what we create with others is of high quality?

Students are growing networks without us, writing Harry Potter narratives together at FanFiction.net, or trading skateboarding videos on YouTube. At school, we disconnect them not only from the technology but also from their passion and those who share it.

The complexities of editing information online cannot be sequestered and taught in a six-week unit. This has to be the way we do our work each day.

The process of collaboration begins with our willingness to share our work and our passions publicly -- a frontier that traditional schools have rarely crossed.

Look no further than Wikipedia to see the potential; say what you will of its veracity, no one can deny that it represents the incredible potential of working with others online for a common purpose.

The technologies we block in their classrooms flourish in their bedrooms

Anyone with a passion for something can connect to others with that same passion -- and begin to co-create and colearn the same way many of our students already do.

I believe that is what educators must do now. We must engage with these new technologies and their potential to expand our own understanding and methods in this vastly different landscape. We must know for ourselves how to create, grow, and navigate these collaborative spaces in safe, effective, and ethical ways. And we must be able to model those shifts for our students and counsel them effectively when they run across problems with these tools.

Later, I talked to the gentleman who thought the session was negative, and his reason was because he was left out, and didn’t know how to get twitter started.

we can tell as people actually took the time to blog about it

I think our culture is being overrun by big mouths & squeaky wheels. Not everyone wants to jump into the mosh pit or finds it boring to have useful information presented in a structured format.

more than 50 percent of Americans aged 20-30 years old use Facebook

among Americans under the age of 35, social networking and user-generated content sites have overtaken TV as a primary media.

“Visitors to MySpace.com and Friendster.com generally skew older, with people age 25 and older comprising 68 and 71 percent of their user bases, respectively.”

We’re in the midst of a paradigm shift where individuals are indeed connecting “in ways and at levels that [they] haven’t done before”

Workplace communities

orkplace communities are designed to solve workplace-related challenges

talent management is about finding, developing, and retaining key talent within the organization

Ernst & Young, for instance, has a significant presence on Facebook in support of its recruiting efforts

Google, Home Depot, Enterprise Rent a Car, and Deloitte also are recruiting using Web 2.0 tools through YouTube videos and even alumni social networks

“If companies keep social networks out, they will be doing a significant disservice to their bottom lines

Between 2000 and 2020, 75 million Boomers will reach retirement age.

The only content service with mass adoption (greater than 50 percent) was Social Networking, and this was only among respondents under the age of 35.”

In addition, Millennials are the first generation to spend more hours online per week than watching TV (16.7 vs 13.6).

some of the characteristics of Millenials, which included a desire to work in  “[open] and flat organizations” as “part of a tribe.”

“heavy use of technology (messaging, collaboration, online learning) as a daily part of their work lives.”

robust and active communities will have an easier time recruiting talented Millennials

they have opportunities to meaningfully connect to their peers and supervisors.

A retiring Boomer who is an expert in a particular field could be an excellent community manager, blogger, or wiki contributor.

Permission is not necessary to satisfy fair use.

Fair use is a doctrine within copyright law that allows use of copyrighted material for educational purposes without permission from the the owners or creators. It is designed to balance rights of users with the rights of owners by encouraging widespread and flexible use of cultural products for the purposes of education and the advancement of knowledge.

My new understanding: I learned on Friday night that the critical test for fairness in terms of educational use of media is transformative use. When a user of copyrighted materials adds value to, or repurposes materials for a use different from that for which it was originally intended, it will likely be considered transformative use; it will also likely be considered fair use. Fair use embraces the modifying of existing media content, placing it in new context.  Examples of transformativeness might include: using campaign video in a lesson exploring media strategies or rhetoric, using music videos to explore such themes as urban violence, using commercial advertisements to explore messages relating to body image or the various different ways beer makers sell beer, remixing a popular song to create a new artistic expression.

Long ago, I learned that educational use of media had to pass four tests to be appropriate and fair according to U.S. Code Title 17 107: the purpose and character of the use, including whether the use is commercial or nonprofit the nature of the use the amount of the use the effect of the use on the potential market for the copyrighted work.

--A Conversation about Media Literacy, Copyright and Fair Use--stirred up more cognitive disonance than I've experienced in years

the discussion was one of several to be held around the country designed to clear up widespread confusion and to: develop a shared understanding of how copyright and fair use applies to the creative media work that our students create and our own use of copyrighted materials as educators, practitioners, advocates and curriculum developers.

national code of practice

Jaszi points to Bill Graham Archives vs.Dorling Kindersley (2006) as a clear example of how courts liberally interpret fair use even with a commercial publisher.

The publisher added value in its use of the posters. And such use was transformative.

Here's what I think I learned on Friday about fair use: The Multimedia Fair Use Guidelines describe minimum rules for fair use, but were never intended as specific rules or designed to exhaust the universe of educational practice.  They were meant as a dynamic, rather than static doctrine, supposed to expand with time, technology, changes in practice.  Arbitrary rules regarding proportion or time periods of use (for instance, 30-second or 45-day rules) have no legal status.  The fact that permission has been sought but not granted is irrelevant.  Permission is not necessary to satisfy fair use. Fair use is fair use without regard to program or platform. What is fair, because it is transformative, is fair regardless of place of use. If a student has repurposed and added value to copyrighted material, she should be able to use it beyond the classroom (on YouTube, for instance) as well as within it.  Not every student use of media is fair, but many uses are. One use not likely to be fair, is the use of a music soundtrack merely as an aesthetic addition to a student video project. Students need to somehow recreate to add value.  Is the music used simply a nice aesthetic addition or does the new use give the piece different meaning? Are students adding value, engaging the music, reflecting, somehow commenting on.the music? Not everything that is rationalized as educationally beneficial is necessarily fair use.  For instance, photocopying a text book because it is not affordable is still not fair use.

Copyright law is friendlier to good teaching than many teachers now realize. Fair use is like a muscle that needs to be exercised.  People can't exercise it in a climate of fear and uncertainty