This is the digital project I created for this course. It's an animated video introducing the topic connected learning. I shared the it on Stanford Education with all the details, I just want to also share here to reach large audiences. Hope it's helpful for you guys. :) 

This post discusses some of the tensions that exist between the increasing effort to enforce Intellectual Property Rights and the impact of the Internet. It introduces Intellectual Property (IP) and Information Technology (IT), and tries to find out how IP and IT can be mutually beneficial. It suggests that in recent year, technology and specifically the Internet, has been changing personal and social behavior, such as they way we learn, the way we do business, and even the way in which wealth is being created. The popularity of information and knowledge on the Internet has posted some threat to IP and copyright issues. However, the Internet users and IP owners are not fully reconciled on the impact of the Internet on IP. IP owners often hold a complicated attitude towards Internet. They eager for the support of users in promoting their products, ideas, services online, but also still want to have almost exclusive control of how those activities are conducted, which often and inherently undermines the desire (and opportunity) to share. Hence although a mutually beneficial relationship between IP and IT can exist, there are still a number of adjustments that ought to be made to better accommodate the changing paradigm that is occurring due to the Internet.

I think this is a dilemma since IP owners need Internet to help them promoting their products, but they have to take the risk that Internet will threaten their ownership and interests. I think a possible way is satisfy both IP owners and IT users is to made the introduction and description of the product free, but if you want to see the whole thing or details, you will have to pay; Or give free trails for a limited time as what many of the software and products are doing right now.

According to this article "The CCC Position on Bill C-32, the Copyright Modernization Act", the CCC, which is an alliance of 16 professional associations of work creators, and represents the position of most creators who hold copyright, shows an opposed position against Bill C-32 and relative stipulations about expanding the categories of fair dealing. The representatives of CCC argue that the share of their works need to be authorized and charged so that they are paid to keep creating. The clauses with regarding to fair dealing is hurting their interests and rights, especially the new "education" exception under "fair dealing" presents a cost saving for schools but eat into the incomes of creators. Nowadays, it becomes increasingly difficult to balance the interest between work creators and the audiences. I think as for alleviating the repulsion from creators and encouraging them to keep creating new works but at the same time, guarantee the interest of fair dealing users, the government funding and support plays a significant role. Government should invest expenditure to financially support the work creators, guarantee their income, and encourage them to make their work open access for a period of time, and issue relevant acts such as the Appropriations Bill, which states that any recipient of federal funding from education, labor, health, social services, any of the different agencies in the federal, any one who receives funding and publishes an article must make that article freely available to everyone not less than 12 months after it's published. This is a good method to promote open access of knowledge and at the same time, protect the interest of creators.

In this article, the author provides an great explanation of the fair dealing and copyright issue in Canada, and clear up some confusions on this issue, especially the Bill C-32 Act. According to the author, fair dealing play a significant role in promoting the openness of knowledge in Canada. It allows users to use a work without permission if the user engage in certain activities. If the use falls into categories of research, private study, news reporting, criticism and review, the user only needs to refer to the author of the work, and Bill C-32 introduces three new categories to fair dealing including parody, satire and education. However, the author mentioned that the inclusion of the purpose of education into fair dealing doesn't really save money for schools and institutions, and they still need to spend over a billion dollars each year on books and hundreds of millions of dollars on licensing for access to databases. I agree with this as I can see there are millions of publications in my university's database that allows all the students to access for free. Moreover, since nowadays, education takes various form, including the use of Internet, online course, and social media to educate, which is not limited to a lecture or in-class format. I think it's becoming increasingly hard to define whether the use of a work falls in the category of education in fair dealing.

This article introduces the dark side and negative effect of information overload and its close cousin, attention fragmentation. It provides executives and their organizations tips to deal with information overload and attention fragmentation by reminding them of several points: First, multitasking is a terrible coping mechanism. A body of scientific evidence demonstrates fairly conclusively that multitasking makes human beings less productive, less creative and less able to make good decision, especially for those who want to be effective leaders. I agree with this opinion, and I think instead of multitasking, we should go with system optimizing, which means a reasonable plan of time, effort and procedure, and completing a task step by step, or several tasks one by one. But for something that can be done together that won't affect the result, we can still go multitasking. For example, we can cook the rice first, the cut the vegetables while we are waiting the the rice to be ready. So it's not absolute. Second, the author addresses that information overload requires enormous self-discipline, for example, senior executives must labor each day to keep themselves on track by applying timeless ye powerful guidelines: find time to focus, filter out the unimportant, forget about work every now and then. Though this article is mainly for executives and organizations, it also have practical implications on individuals and provides helpful experience for us.

This article provides a in depth analysis of the future trend of library in the current digital age. According to the author, the rapid development of digital technologies and Internet has changed the way we access information and contributed to openness and abundance of information online. Under such circumstance, library might go in decline, and one day it might even be unnecessary. As the author indicates, "a library without books is unthinkable. Now it seems almost inevitable. Like so many other time-honored institutions of intellectual and cultural life-publishing, journalism, and the university, to name a few-the library finds itself on a precipice at the dawn of a digital era." "Libraries will only survive if the communities they serve want and need them to. It's up to the scholars, makers, and artists, seekers of community, access and safe haven, and above all, readers in the old, human sense of the world, to rise the level of these monuments we've built. "

I agree with the author's opinion that library will suffer from challenging situations as the rapid develop of information technology in the information age. But I think library won't be replaced because it has its own irreplaceable role. Firstly, though today information is largely access through the Internet, the quality of information online is not guaranteed, thus the library still play a role in providing authorized knowledge and literature. Secondly, though open access of information online has contributed to the abundance and openness of information, its still not fair for particular regions and countries in the world due to digital divide. Thus, government funded public library is necessary in these areas. Thirdly, for seniors and older adults who are not Internet savvy, library is crucial in providing them with abundant information and knowledge. Thus, though stepped into the information age, library still has its irreplaceable role, but it might need to figure out new operating and developing models.

Description: A synthesis of theories, principles and core values of connected learning 

Description: "For all the benefits of the information technology and communications revolution, it has a well-known dark side: information overload and its close cousin, attention fragmentation. These scourges hit CEOs and their colleagues in the C-suite particularly hard because senior executives so badly need uninterrupted time to synthesize information from many different sources, reflect on its implications for the organization, apply judgment, make trade-offs, and arrive at good decisions."

Article Title: The CCC Position on Bill C-32, the Copyright Modernization Act

Description: "Fair dealing has played a prominent role in the hearings on Bill C-32, with education and creator groups debating the merits and impact of the proposed reforms.  Unfortunately, much of the discussion has confused rather than clarified the issue with misleading claims about potential losses, inaccurate comments on copyright and Internet materials, and dubious arguments about the compliance of the reforms under international copyright law."

Description: I found this is a great source for understanding the concept of information overload, its historical and technological contexts, its causes, and solutions. 

Description: "How 'bridging elites' help on Twitter, perceptions of news by a skeptical public, and Wikipedia pages as newsmaking destinations: all that and more in this month's roundup of the academic literature."

Description: Tips for dealing with information overload, experience from people in different areas, using different information access channels.

Description: This article explains issues about copyright, unregulated uses and fair use.

Description: "This post discusses some of the tensions that exist between the increasing effort to enforce Intellectual Property Rights and the impact of the Internet." "It suggests that Internet users and IP owners are not fully reconciled on the impact of the Internet on IP. IP owners are often eager for the support of users in promoting their products, ideas, services online, still want to have almost exclusive control of how those activities are conducted, which often and inherently undermines the desire (and opportunity) to share. Hence although a mutually beneficial relationship between IP and IT can exist, there are still a number adjustments that ought to be made to better accommodate the changing paradigm that is occurring due to the Internet."