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What they're fighting about: The educational video publishers claim that UCLA is violating copyright and breaching its contract by copying DVD's of Shakespeare plays acquired from Ambrose and streaming them online for faculty and students to use in courses. They say UCLA had the right only to lend copies to teachers for in-class use or to show the DVD's in the library itself.

The university did not "secure the right to stream our programs from a library server to any class and any student whenever it chooses," said Allen Dohra, president of the trade group, in a written statement. UCLA says copyright law permits streaming.

Much is also at stake for publishers, who say UCLA's practice could be catastrophic for the educational-video business. They fear it will cut off new markets for distributors like Ambrose, which sells its own streaming service.

Advanced capture technology has become almost ubiquitous in higher education: If your institution doesn't have it, chances are that you're trailing the competition. Students want it. Tech-savvy teachers like it. And blended learning environments practically demand it.

Interestingly, faculty at many institutions now see lecture capture as a way to help transform those large classes into the kind of interactive learning experience that Laster describes.

Laster feels that lecture capture really comes into its own in those courses that teach the fundamentals to large classes. "Lecture capture as a replacement for the 400-student experience in the lecture hall can make a lot of sense," he explains. "But where you have a more interactive classroom style, it doesn't make sense."

After months (okay, maybe weeks) of planning, I’m excited to announce the introduction of the College of the Liberal Arts iPad Summer Research Project (CLAISRP?  Perhaps this is an initiative that is better left without an acronym.) We in the Liberal Arts are already exploring the utility of the iPad for classroom use, thanks to the efforts of Stuart Selber.

“Ultimately, we want ideas from the symposium to have a broad impact across the university,” he said.

Flat World Knowledge, the largest publisher of free and open college textbooks for students worldwide, today announced the release of a new platform called MIYO (Make It Your Own) (http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/miyo). The fully-automated system gives professors greater control over textbook content, and the ability, with one click, to make their modified book available to students free online or in multiple, low-cost digital and print formats.

The new system uses familiar drag-and-drop and click features that allow instructors to easily move or delete chapters and sections; upload Word and PDF documents; add notes and exercises; insert video and hyperlinks; edit sentences; and incorporate other content that is free to reuse under a Creative Commons open license.

If kids can get the lectures, can get the content delivery and skill modeling as well (or often better) by computer lecture than in person, why do we have use precious class-time for this purpose?  Why do we, in the status quo,  replicate in person in our classrooms what is easily available elsewhere, the content delivery/skill modeling, and then have kids apply their learning to difficult problems at home, without us there to help? Increasingly,  education’s value-add is and will be in the coaching and troubleshooting when students are applying their learning, and in challenging students to apply their thinking to hands-on learning by doing and teaming:  so let’s have them do these things in class, not sit and listen.   We know that collaboration is a critical skill set which can’t be developed easily either on-line or at home alone– let’s have students learn it with us in our classrooms.   Let every classroom be a collaborative problem solving laboratory or studio.

The decision by the MIT faculty in 2001 to allow anyone to use their course content was a seminal move,  one that had a profound effect on democratizing education.

ALLOWING CUSTOMIZATION. MIT OCW is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike-Non-Commercial License. That means that teachers and learners are able to share and remix the content that’s available.

ENCOURAGING SHARING. Do educators have an ethical responsibility to share? Open CourseWare reminds us that a large part of our role as educators is to share knowledge, and we should work to remove the barriers that make that possible.

One founder of the site, David Adewumi, said the idea was spurred by the features Penn State’s current ANGEL course management system lacks. “Everyone knows ANGEL is terrible for students,” Adewumi (senior-Spanish) said. “It’s about managing courses for faculty and staff. We’re making a solution that is perfect for what students need to do group things.”

Language specialists at Indiana University have developed a new application for the iPad that will help people working in strategic areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan to read and write in Pashto, one of the region's primary languages.