The Dark Side of the 21st Century:  
Concerns About Technologies in Education
The main navigation page is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 

Bob Jensen at Trinity University

Meanwhile, from an infinity of online sources, heads are being filled with data, information, and images, from all manner of sources — responsible, sensible, loony, exploitative, and malevolent. Fencing off children from much of this stuff has become a major parental concern, as well as a hopeless task, given children’s zest for the forbidden and preternatural facility at the keyboard.
Dan Greenberg, "We've Got a Monster on the Loose: It's Called the Internet," Chronicle of Higher Education, February 27, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/index.php?id=247

A Vision of Students Today (Video) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o

Table of Contents
ALN is defined as Asynchronous Learning Network(s) or Networking

"A Virtual Revolution: Trends in the Expansion of Distance Education"

Brain Alterations Caused by the World Wide Web

The U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act Undermines Public Access and Sharing 
(Included Copyright Information and Dead Link Archives)

Also see Bob Jensen's threads on cheating and plagiarism
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm

Shrinking Customer Base for eLearning?

Millions of Web Documents are Not Being Archived for Future Scholars

Are Universities Becoming EMOs (Educational Maintenance Organizations)?

Concerns About Academic Standards, School Ethics and Student Ethics 

Controversies in Regulation of Distance Education

Barriers to Distance Education 

How can colleges best mix on-campus and online delivery of instruction?

Concerns About Faculty Resistance to Change and Mutation  
Teachers Must Adapt to Changed Mindsets of Incoming Students Who Grew Up With Computers

Concerns About Faculty Workloads and Burnout 

Online Cheating and Reduced Social Interaction 

Legal Concerns 

Email and Teaching Evaluations Place Heavy Burdens on Teachers

Student Concerns  

Is your distance site operating within the law in terms of access by disabled students? 
Schools must demonstrate progress toward compliance.

The Digital Divide is Real

Lots of Hype and Not Much Profit 

Institutions, Reward Structures, and Traditions That Defy Changes in Higher Education

Websites Failing Disabled and Handicapped Users 

Concerns About the Explosion of Online Education

Concerns About High Attrition Rates in Distance Education

Concerns About Residency Living & Learning on Campus

Concerns About Impersonality and Becoming Irrevocably Orwellian

Concerns About Making ALN Learning Too Easy

Concerns About Making ALN Learning Too Hard

Concerns About Corporate Influences on Traditional Missions

Concerns About Library Services 

Concerns About Academic Standards, School Ethics and Student Ethics 

Concerns About Messaging Overload

Concerns About Faculty Efficiency and Burnout

Concerns About Misleading and Fraudulent Web Sites

Concerns About Video Game Addiction and CyberPsychology

Concerns About Computer Services and Network Reliability

Concerns About Faculty Resistance to Change

Concerns About Effectiveness of Learning Technologies in Large Classes

Other Concerns  

Students’ Distress with a Web-based Distance Education Course: An Ethnographic Study of Participants' Experiences

New Foes 

A Message from Peter Kenyon on November 18, 1999

The Force and the Darkside

The Sanford Report in the Stanford Report 

David Noble's Articles on Digital Diploma Mills

David Noble's Concerns for Students' Privacy Rights 

Update Messages on Trends in Corporate Education

Daring Professors

Growing Up is More Anxiety-Provoking/Stressful

PowerPoint and Other Teaching Helpers (Socratic Dialogue Gives Way to PowerPoint) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#PowerPointHelpers

Generation Gaps, Collegial Apathy or Hostility, and Loneliness --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#DarkSide

Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

The Downside of Electronic Commerce and Technology:  Psychological Implications --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm#Psychology 

Bob Jensen's threads on edutainment and learning games are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theTools.htm#Edutainment

The main navigation page is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 

Note from Bob Jensen:  This article delves rather deeply into the pedagogies of online programs such as programs at the University of Phoenix and UNext's Cardian University.

"A Virtual Revolution:  Trends in the Expansion of Distance Education," by Thomas J. Kriger, USDLA Journal (a refereed journal of the United States Distance Learning Association," November 2001 --- http://www.usdla.org/ED_magazine/illuminactive/NOV01_Issue/article02.html 

This report describes four major trends leading the growth of distance education. The purpose is not to cover every provider but to draw a picture of the types of organizational structures and educational activities that are on the rise. These include:

• Existing higher education institutions that have or are developing distance education programs, such as e-Cornell, NYU Online, the University of Illinois On-line; University of Maryland University College, Rio Salado Community College, the SUNY Learning Network and Virtual Temple;
• Full virtual universities, such as the University of Phoenix Online, Western Governors University, Andrew Jackson University, Cappella University, Jones International University, Kennedy-Warren University;
• Corporate university or training institutions, such as the members of Corporate University Xchange and Click2learn.

Corporate-university joint ventures. those that provide course management systems such as Blackboard, Campus Pipeline, eCollege and Web CT, as well as those who package and distribute courses or content from existing institutions such as UNext.com, Cenquest, Fathom, Global Education Network, Quisic and Universitas 21;

What do we learn from these descriptions? First, we learn that the variety of new ways to organize DE and reach new students is enormous, as is the talent that can be brought to bear in making education attractive in the new medium. But we also find that the way distance education is being organized and conducted often poses serious questions.

Much of the distance education under study here, whether non-profit or for-profit, is built on corporate ideas about consumer focus, product standardization, tight personnel control and cost effectiveness (maximizing course taking while minimizing the "inputs" of faculty and development time). These concepts are contrary to the traditional model of higher education decision-making which emphasizes faculty independence in teaching and research, academic control of the curriculum, academic freedom in the classroom and collegial decision-making.

While traditional practices are not sacrosanct, academic decision making processes have been very successful in producing quality higher education the best in the world. Our concern is that some of the new trends and practices described in this report may inhibit rather than promote good education. A number of specific concerns arose:

• Education based primarily on the marketplace and the model of "student as customer" is too narrow. Student and industry preferences certainly matter in designing curricula, but if pleasing the customer is the pre-eminent value, there is a real danger that the curriculum will not be coherent, rigorous enough or broad enough to meet the student's long-term interests.
• A central characteristic of many DE providers is to "unbundle" the faculty role so that different specialists develop the curriculum, teach the course, evaluate student performance, etc. This allows for greater standardization but it may not add up to better education.
• Standardization of coursework also inhibits students from being exposed to the diverse views of different faculty members with varying knowledge and perspectives. This diversity is important in enabling students to hone their own ideas and knowledge.
• Some programs exhibited an inclination to increase class size as a means of increasing the financial output of a course. The only proper consideration in fixing class size is to maintain the best level to facilitate learning.
• Some programs rely too heavily on testing for individual "outcomes" and "competencies" while downgrading the importance of class time and social interaction in developing deep knowledge about a subject. Along the same lines, distance education providers too often dismiss the importance of same-time same-place interaction rather than building it into their programs whenever possible.

It is appropriate, indeed essential, to present information for the DE marketplace in an attractive, computer-friendly fashion. But over-attention to drawing "customers" may result in technology driving the way teaching is conducted-leading, for example, to models centered around bite-size, "point and click" accumulations of facts rather than a more reflective, less easily measured search for knowledge.

In the year 2000, AFT published Distance Education: Guidelines for Good Practice. The guidelines lay out 14 specific standards which, if observed, ensure high quality distance education. (A synopsis of the guidelines appears in the report's conclusion.) The guidelines advance AFT's belief that broad academic content, high standards, personal interaction and professional control are the key elements of educational quality. College faculty must insist on sound practice based on a broad vision of education-one that recognizes education is about more than facts, more than competencies, more than career ambitions.

Education, among other things, is about broadening intellectual horizons, relying on facts and reason when confronting life issues and learning to listen to others and defend ideas by the force of argument. That is why education is the foundation of a working democracy. Because distance education is ubiquitous and offers so much promise, faculty are obligated to carry the banner for quality and good practice while recognizing that this will sometimes require challenging current trends and practices

Continued at  http://www.usdla.org/ED_magazine/illuminactive/NOV01_Issue/article02.html  

Bob Jensen's documents on distance education are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 

University Teachers: Know Your Copy Rights!
From the University of Illinois Blog Issues in Scholarly Communications on February 12, 2007 --- http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/scholcomm/

The American Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has recently produced a 6-page pamphlet about the rights teachers and teaching assistants have to share with their classes the intellectual property produced by others. Know Your Copy Rights: What You Can Do provides tips and guidelines for when articles, video, music, images, and other intellectual property can be shared with students under the banner of "fair use". Among the topics covered in the brochure are: fair use, the advantages of linking to instead of copying works, and special provisions for displaying or performing works in classes. It also includes a handy one-page chart that highlights 24 situations when various categories of works can be used. The pamphlet is free to download.

 

Online Pedagogy at the University of Phoenix

Phoenix faculty work in a highly structured environment. Course facilitators in traditional classes are forbidden to lecture. Faculty are, instead, expected to closely follow Phoenix's "teaching/ learning model," which begins with course syllabi and detailed teaching modules developed by fulltime faculty on the main campus. In this way, faculty responsibilities are broken down into a series of discrete steps, such as when course development is detached from teaching. Phoenix course modules "include guidelines for weekly assignments, group activities and grading."  Some course modules contain classroom time-management guidelines broken down into 15-minute intervals.

Phoenix defends its practice of using these restrictive guidelines in the name of standardization. The university's online catalog declares: "The standardized curriculum for each degree program provides students with specified levels of knowledge and skills regardless of the delivery method or classroom location."

Critics argue, however, that Phoenix's course modules violate academic freedom because they don't allow faculty members sufficient discretion. Milton R. Blood, managing director of the American Assembly of the Collegiate Schools of Business, has characterized Phoenix's standardized curriculum as "McEducation." He explained, "It's a redefinition of how we go about delivering higher education. The question is whether it's really higher education when it's delivered in a franchised way."

Thomas J. Kriger, quoted from the article cited above.

Dark side questions about distance education from the Kriger article cited above.

Evaluation of Distance Coursework Should Be Undertaken at all Levels:

Questions about DE trends and practices

1. The marketplace and the curriculum: Most of the models outlined in this report emphasize meeting immediate market demands for coursework as well as treating students primarily as "customers." It is entirely appropriate to consider student and industry preferences in designing curricula, particularly in the corporate training arena. However, we believe that the pre-eminent perspective should be that of academic professionals rather than the marketplace. One concern is that the pure "student as consumer" model rests on the questionable assumption that student-consumers know what they want when they begin an educational program and can confidently decide what courses will lead to the desired educational "product." Another concern is that broad-based liberal arts coursework, as well as high academic standards, could take a back seat if market models become dominant.

2. Technological capabilities and the curriculum: In one of the stories cited earlier, a distance education advocate explained that professors will have to curb their lectures in order to fit their ideas into a 256-character dialogue box. This raises serious questions. Technological capabilities and limitations should not be the primary factor driving the curriculum and research required of distance education students, rather than the rich interplay among research, curriculum and good pedagogy.

3. Faculty decision-making: To ensure that academic decisions are made for academic reasons, a key characteristic of quality in distance education is ensuring that faculty are in control of shaping and approving courses and integrating them into a coherent curriculum. This is the number one item in AFT's Guidelines for Good Practice. Another basic precept is academic freedom; an individual faculty member should have the authority to determine how the class will be taught.

We are concerned, however, that many of the programs described above appear to keep authority to develop course content confined to a very narrow circle. Some models directly challenge the idea of academic freedom in the classroom. For example, at

the University of Phoenix, we saw that course "facilitators" (they are not called teachers) not only are forbidden to lecture, but also must follow detailed teaching modules.

4. Disaggregation: Many of the institutions reviewed here are moving to a model of curriculum development and teaching that "unbundles" the many roles of the faculty member. A process that has traditionally been maintained from start to finish by the individual faculty member is being parted into specializations-curriculum developers, content deliverers, assessment specialists, etc. This can be seen most starkly in movements such as "The National Learning Infrastructure Initiative" (NLII) created in 1994 by Educom (now Educause), a coalition of technology corporations, public and private colleges and universities and higher education organizations.

Specifically, the NLII would increase student access through the construction of a broadband network modeled on the Internet. The program would be characterized by self-paced study instead of academic calendars, fixed class meetings or a traditional curriculum. Students would pursue their studies via new instructional software that breaks down complex subjects into individual components or modules.

In 1996, Educom released a report on "The Virtual University," which envisions the resulting new role for faculty and the benefits for the institution.

[In the virtual university], the many roles previously combined in a single faculty member are now disaggregated. Faculty may specialize as developers of courses and courseware wherein they move from being content experts to being a combination of content expert, learning-process design expert, and process-implementation manager; as presenters of that material; as expert assessors of learning and competencies; as advisors; or as specialists in other evolving roles.[43]

In this view, one of the main advantages of the NLII is that it would "reduce faculty intervention, thereby containing costs."[44] As Massy and Zemsky explain:

Workstations don't get tenure, and delegations are less likely to wait on the provost when particular equipment items are "laid off." The "retraining" of IT equipment (for example, reprogramming), while not inexpensive, is easier and more predictable than training a tenured professor .[45]

As our report indicates, many providers in all four categories have embraced this vision to differing extents, but the AFT believes this is not the best route to quality. Quoting directly from the AFT Guidelines. A number of studies have demonstrated the importance to student learning of establishing a feedback loop between classroom teaching, curriculum development and scholarly research. That loop becomes inoperative when teaching faculty operate from workbooks based on a prefabricated curriculum that the faculty member has little role in developing, a curriculum that was not shaped directly by the practitioner's experience in teaching these classes or conducting research on these subjects. Students deserve teachers who know all the nuances of what they are teaching and who can exercise professional judgment and academic freedom in doing so.

5. Course standardization: Many of the providers outlined above are attracted to the idea of creating consistent and transferable courses by utilizing course management software and course development specialists. The idea is that an institution or set of institutions can make all of their courses have the same look and feel, and that courses can and should be designed for longevity and transferability. If course management software such as Web CT or Blackboard simply provide faculty with greater technical support and facilitate the faculty member's pedagogy, then they will be powerful teaching aids. But standardization in programming and teaching is the wrong way to go; academic good practice requires a faculty with differing points of view and presentation styles, freewheeling discussion and academic freedom.

6. Class Size: AFT's distance education practitioners report that good DE generally requires more teacher preparation time than a traditional class as well as more time devoted to interacting with students (through e-mail, chat rooms, etc.) Therefore, it is important to maintain a workable class size. The concern, however, is that commercially minded DE will expand class sizes too greatly in order to maximize enrollments. The move on the part of some providers to concentrate on offering high-enrollment introductory courses (such as introductory psychology) is of particular concern because DE practitioners tell us the students best suited to succeed in a distance education environment are not the newcomers but those who are more mature, better prepared and able to work independently.

Increasing class size is an integral part of the Pew grants at Rio Salado College cited earlier. Introductory algebra, which had the third highest enrollment of the top 25 courses in the district, was selected for redesign. Course content was delivered via interactive software. The restructuring increased the student/faculty ratio from 35 to 100 students per instructor, although each faculty member was assigned teaching assistants to help with technology questions, and students had access to a help desk.[46] AFT's Guidelines recommend that class size be established through normal faculty channels, with a view to maintaining a high level of interactivity. "Given the time commitment involved in teaching through distance education," say the Guidelines, "smaller class size should be considered, particularly at the inception of a new course."

7. "Outcomes" and Class Time: Some providers cited in the previous chapter shift more of the educational assessment to "outcomes." The Western Governors University emphasis on "proficiencies" is the most extreme version of this shift. A greater emphasis on outcomes may be warranted, but a critical question remains: Will an exclusive focus on measurable outputs shortchange the importance of process and interactivity in higher education?

Distance education advocates often deride what they call "seat time"-the practice of requiring students to be together and work together for periods of time before passing their courses. Under their theory, if a student can demonstrate "competencies," it should not matter how much time is spent achieving these competencies. The AFT, however, believes that deep knowledge of a subject is not simply a matter of passing a competency test. It does in fact require time-time in the same room or in cyberspace-with teachers and other students chewing over ideas, hearing contrary points of view and defending conclusions. There is reason for concern if time on task comes to be viewed as a luxury rather than a necessity in DE on the corporate model.

8. Same-time, same-place interaction: There is no denying that rich interaction can take place in distance education classes, but we believe it is equally untenable to argue that same-time, sameplace interaction has no legitimate role in an undergraduate education. We believe distance education should utilize every available opportunity to bring students and faculty together at some time during an academic program. Our concern is that providing such opportunities does not appear to be a consideration for most of the providers we have stud-

led. It is particularly troubling to have no sametime, same-place interchange through an entire undergraduate program. AFT faculty who teach by distance education have reported to the union that they believe same-time, same-place interaction should be part of any undergraduate program. In fact, more than 70 percent say that no more than half of a full undergraduate program should be delivered via distance education.

In conclusion, it is proper, even necessary, for higher education faculty to make distance education work, but that may often mean contradicting current DE practice to affirm academic values. Faculty must mobilize behind the principle that democratic governance rather than top-down management produces better, more credible education. Faculty must ensure that college degrees are awarded in the context of a coordinated curriculum with broad-based content. Faculty must see to it that students have the equipment, training and support to succeed in the distance education environment and that they have appropriate academic counseling. Faculty must make the case that time does matter-that education is not simply a matter of passing a competency test but, whether in the same room or far apart, being with other teachers and students chewing over ideas, hearing contrary points of view and defending conclusions. Faculty must assert and find ways to implement the notion that same-time, same-place interchange is an important part of a college education. Faculty must always affirm the importance of free exchange of ideas.

In short, faculty must insist on sound practice based on a broad vision of education-one that recognizes education is about more than facts, more than competencies, more than career ambitions the things that can be easily "sold." Education is about broadening one's intellectual horizons, learning to rely on facts and reason rather than on prejudices when confronting life issues. It is about learning to listen to others and defend ideas by the force of argument. It is about learning respect and acquiring open mindedness, and as such, education is the foundation of a working democracy.

Distance education can make an important contribution toward achieving these goals if it is organized around practices such as those in AFT's Distance Education: Guidelines for Good Practice. However, no one should imagine that implementing these guidelines will be easy in a world where the promise of big dollars and big enrollments constantly beckons. AFT and its members, other organizations representing the faculty and, of course, individual faculty members themselves, will have to be prepared to take up

Brain Alterations Caused by the World Wide Web

The Case Against the World Wide Web
A provocative article in the forthcoming issue of Atlantic Monthly argues that Web surfing is rewiring our brains, making us unable to stay focused long enough to make it to the end of a book or long article. To support his thesis, the author, Nicholas Carr, cites these scholars: Bruce Friedman, of the University of Michigan Medical School; Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University; and James Olds, a professor of neuroscience at George Mason University. Mr. Carr also mentions a report of online research habits by scholars from University College London. A study by the National Endowment for the Arts also seems to support Mr. Carr's argument. The study, "To Read or Not to Read," showed, among other things, that the portion of college graduates who were proficient in reading prose declined 23 percent from 1992 to 2003.
Andrea L. Foster, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 12, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3085&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

For a short while the Atlantic Monthly article ("Is Google Making Us Stupid?") may be downloaded free from http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
People generally read some books for pure entertainment and the fast passage of time. With Agatha Christie still being my favorite mystery writer, I read mystery books like Agatha Christie might've written while I'm on airplanes and in hospital waiting rooms and even while Erika shops. I read these without looking for embedded messages other than learning about properties of some poisons is I ever did undertake to commit murder.

People read some books for the message, especially passages from the Bible or Qur'an or biographies about great leaders or teachers like Abraham Lincoln, Socrates, and Albert Einstein.

People read some classics for both entertainment and embedded messages such as Moby Dick and the great books of Leo Tolstoy, although I must admit that several times in my life I grew too weary of Tolstoy to ever finish War and Peace. Often the benefits of the message are not worth the wearying effort to wade through the verbiage. This is probably why even our best writers often turn to short stories or magazine/journal articles or poems to communicate their messages.

I don't blame the Internet for the decline in book reading or the speed reading and scanning of books. The Internet is a fault only to the extent that it is part of our frenetic lifestyles and the flood of information from more and more books, articles, television, NetFlix DVDs, Blockbuster DVDs, etc. Books have to compete with many newer alternatives aside from the Internet. And our lifestyles just do not make it easy to find a few hours each day to read a long book cover-to-cover. Admittedly part of the problem is the added time we now devote to email messaging, blogs, online journals, podcasts, Webcasts, and Bob Jensen's tidbits. But somehow I personally think I would be depriving myself of much learning if I cut off my broadband cable and started working my way through the classics or the endless stream of new, often poorly written, so-called best sellers.

There's nothing sacrosanct about book reading in the information age. Books must compete with other alternatives. And often books are very worth while, although I must admit that I'm prone to speed reading and scanning just like I was 50 years ago. There's more in Randy Pausch's new short book than in his video speeches, television interviews, and most likely the forthcoming movie about his life and death. Some books we just read to learn more about what we can't find anywhere else. This makes books compete if they contain more of what we are seeking. I'm not really seeking to learn more about Barbara Walter's sex life, so I don't choose to read her autobiography. But there are books that I seek out because I want to know more about particular topics.

I find that the main advantage of a printed book is that I like reading from hard copy rather than a computer screen and that I find books to be better than any other alternative for perusing and scanning. I must admit that I rarely, if ever, read every word in any book at any time. I guess this goes with my Type A personality and aversion for wasting time even at things like golf. There's a golf course on two sides of my property and a life-time membership came with the purchase of my house. I've played a total of five holes in five years up here in the mountains because there are better things to do like spending ten hours a day on the Internet. Maybe there's something true about "The Case Against the World Wide Web."

Perhaps my brain really has been altered by the WWW, at least what's left of my aging brain!

"Staying Smart in Dumbed-Down Times," by Judith Shapiro, Inside Higher Ed, June 13, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/06/13/shapiro

In 1963, when I was graduating from college, a book was published entitled Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, by the noted historian Richard Hofstadter. In exploring anti-intellectualism as a major current of American culture, Hofstadter examined various facets of our nation’s history over time. He described how those living in rural areas grew suspicious of urban life. He analyzed how utilitarianism and practicality, associated with the world of business, were accompanied by a certain contempt for the life of the mind. He devoted special attention to evangelicalism, although we should perhaps more specifically define his target as fundamentalism, a literal-minded approach to the Bible that involved hostility to all forms of knowledge that contradicted scripture or sought to interpret it as a set of historical documents reflecting the context of its production. He noted how all of this combined to make the term “elite” a dirty word.

This exploration of American national character, which was very much a product of his times, notably the atmosphere of fear and distrust that characterized the Cold War, is still quite timely today. Which is why I felt compelled to re-read Hofstadter’s book last summer. And why I was particularly interested in reading an update and homage to Hofstadter by Susan Jacoby, whose book The Age of American Unreason was published just this year.

Jacoby brings Hofstadter’s arguments into the present, illustrating them with examples from the times in which we live today. She talks about the powerful role played by fundamentalist forms of religion in current America; about the abysmal level of public education; about the widespread inability to distinguish between science and pseudoscience; about the dumbing-down of the media and politics; about the consequences of a culture of serious reading being replaced by a rapid-fire, short-attention-span-provoking, over-stimulating, largely visual, information-spewing environment.

She, like Hofstadter, invites us to consider how all of this has affected the great venture that is American democracy? So, let us do so.

Once upon a time, the leaders of our country were the kind of men — and, let’s face it, it was a men’s club at the time — who were learned, who valued scholarship and science. The American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743 at the instigation of Benjamin Franklin, counted also among its early members presidents George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison.

In adopting as its mission the promotion of “useful knowledge”, the American Philosophical Society reflected a time in which the sciences and the humanities were not divided from one another, and in which there was no opposition between what we might now call pure and applied science. What it did reflect was an opposition between Enlightenment values of reason and empirical research, on the one hand, and what we might call “faith based” beliefs, on the other. There were clergymen among the early members of the APS, but they were those who felt that their religious convictions did not stand in their way of their desire to be among the most educated members of their society.

That was then. This is now: We have a president who believes that “creation science” should be taught in our schools. As Jacoby points out, we should understand “how truly extraordinary it [is] that any American president would place himself in direct opposition to contemporary scientific thinking.”

But let’s not just pin the tail on the elephant here and pick only on the Republicans — or, to be more precise, on the extreme right wing of the Republican party, since there are, after all (though they may be increasingly hard to locate), moderate, thoughtful — one might even say, liberal — Republicans.

Let’s look at the Democrats, at the nomination fight we all followed – followed, it seems, since the early Pleistocene. Here we had two candidates vying to run for President who had been educated at institutions that are among the most distinguished in our country: Wellesley, Yale, Columbia and Harvard. Both candidates were obviously highly intelligent and knowledgeable. Yet both felt the need to play down their claims to intellectuality — and the winner may still feel that need in the general election. Hillary Clinton chugalugged beer and sought to attach the dread label of “elitist” to her rival. And Barack Obama felt compelled to follow one of the most honest and sophisticated political speeches in recent memory with strenuous displays of folksiness.

And who are we to blame them? If anyone is going to serve as president, the first step is to get elected. What level of intellectual interest and background can political candidates presuppose on the part of our nation’s citizenry? What level of interest in the most important challenges facing us in the years ahead? What level of public demand that assertions be backed up with sound reasoning and actual facts?

To take just one example: citing data from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, released in 2005, Jacoby notes that two-thirds of Americans believe that both evolution and creationism should be taught in our public schools. Who would have thought that, all these years after the United States became the laughing stock of the civilized world through international newspaper coverage of the Scopes trial, we would still see the fight we have recently seen in the state of Pennsylvania over teaching creationism in our public schools?

Nor is this simply a matter of religious belief. Many who advocate teaching creationism do so in the name of providing a “fair and balanced” curriculum. This misplaced pluralism, which draws no distinction between the results of scientific inquiry and the content of folk beliefs, is in line with the loose way in which the word “theory” is used, such that Einstein’s “theory” of relativity or Darwin’s “theory” of evolution is on a par with the loose way we use “theory” to describe any kind of wild guess. In this latter sense, “theory” is used as the opposite of “fact”, rather than as a systematic set of hypotheses to explain a variety of facts. Moreover, simply changing the label from “creationism” to “creation science” or “intelligent design” gives this set of untestable and unfalsifiable assertions the veneer of science, which is quite enough for a lot of people who have little or no sense of what real science is.

But let us not let the scientists and scholars themselves off the hook. Jacoby devotes some interesting passages in her book to forms of pseudo-science that were at various times in our history embraced by members of the most educated classes. Back in the 19th and early 20th centuries, we had social Darwinism, which sought to justify differences between rich and poor as a reflection of “survival of the fittest” (which, by the way, was not an expression coined by Darwin). And lest we look upon those benighted forebears too complacently, let us keep in mind that, much more recently, we have had sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, which share many of the same faults, though in more sophisticated trappings, as befits the trajectory of the natural and social sciences since the 19th century unilinear evolutionism of Herbert Spencer and others.

Returning to the world of politics, the first presidential candidate I campaigned for myself — I was 10 years old at the time and we were having a mock convention in my elementary school (those were the days when candidates actually got chosen at the party’s national convention) — that first presidential candidate was the quintessential, unelectable intellectual Adlai Stevenson, who ran against Dwight Eisenhower. One of the well-known anecdotes about him is the time a woman went up to him after a speech and said, “Mr. Stevenson, every thinking American will be voting for you.” To which he replied, “Madam, that is not enough. I need a majority.”

In her chapter on “Public Life”, which is subtitled “Defining Dumbness Downward”, Jacoby opens by talking about the extemporaneous speech given by Robert Kennedy on April 4th, 1968, when he had just learned, before taking the stage in Indianapolis, that the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. had just been assassinated in Memphis. Kennedy began by invoking from memory the following lines from Aeschylus:

Even in our sleep, pain which we cannot forget
Falls drop by drop upon the heart,
Until, in our own despair,
Against our will,
Comes wisdom
Through the awful grace of God.

Jacoby notes how inconceivable it is today that a major political figure, an aspirant to the highest office in the land, would use such a quote, given the pervasive fear nowadays of seeming to be an “elitist.” Yet Robert Kennedy was not showing off to his audience or condescending to them. He just assumed that he could address them in this way, whether or not they themselves were familiar with these lines, much less could quote them from memory.

Jacoby’s discussion of the dumbing down of our public, political culture follows a chapter on what she calls “The Culture of Distraction”. She worries over the consequences of our being constantly bombarded by noisy stimuli, by invitations to multitask in a way that fosters superficiality as opposed to depth. The major casualties of our current media-saturated life are three things essential to the vocation of an intellectual: silence, solitary thinking, and social conversation.

Continued in article

The U.S Digital Millennium Copyright Act  (DMCA)
 Undermines Public Access and Sharing
DMCA Link:  http://www.loc.gov/copyright/legislation/dmca.pdf 

Also see Bob Jensen's threads on cheating and plagiarism
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm

A Fair(y) Tale:  Animated cartoon about copyright law --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJn_jC4FNDo
Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University created this humorous, yet informative, review of copyright principles delivered through the words of the very folks we can thank for nearly endless copyright terms.  Also see http://snipurl.com/fairu1
Bob Jensen's threads on the DMCA are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm

Harvard Study:  Copyright restrictions limit the spread of digital learning tools
Copyright restrictions limit the spread of digital learning tools in schools and colleges, according to a new report from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, at Harvard University.
Inside Higher Ed, July 19, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/19/qt

From the AAUP (with higher education in mind)
Campus Copyright Rights and Responsibilities: A Basic Guide to Policy Considerations --- http://www.aaupnet.org/aboutup/issues/Campus_Copyright.pdf

New Guidelines for Copyright Policies in Universities
Four associations have released a guide for colleges to use in reviewing whether their copyright policies reflect recent legal and technological developments. The guide notes that colleges and their faculty members are major producers of copyrighted material, and that professors and students also are big users of such material — sometimes in ways that create legal difficulties. The groups that prepared the guide are the Association of American Universities, the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of American University Presses, and the Association of American Publishers.
Inside Higher Ed, December 7, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/12/07/qt

A report released yesterday by a pair of free-expression advocates at New York University Law School's Brennan Center for Justice claims Web site owners and remix artists alike are finding free-expression rights squelched because of ambiguities in copyright law. The study argues that so-called "fair use" rights are under attack. It suggests six major steps for change, including reducing penalties for infringement and making a greater number of pro-bono lawyers available to defend alleged fair users. BNA's Internet Law News (ILN) - 12/6/2005
Coverage at http://news.com.com/2100-1030_3-5983072.html"> 
Report at http://www.fepproject.org/policyreports/WillFairUseSurvive.pdf">a>
From the University of Illinois Scholarly Communication Blog on December 7, 2005 --- http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/scholcomm/ 

Question
Are you clueless about protecting your rights to your own writings?

"Librarian: Ohio State Professors Need Copyright Refresher," by Andrea L. Foster, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 14, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2665&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Beware of faculty members who are clueless about whether they hold the copyrights to their research papers, Trisha Davis, a librarian at Ohio State University, told a group of librarians today at the midwinter conference of the American Library Association.

She made the remark while discussing the challenges Ohio State faced in building an institutional repository. The university has over 21,000 articles — including conference papers, teaching materials, photographs, and multimedia works — in the archive.

Faculty members will submit research papers to the repository often unaware that they have signed away the rights to their work to a journal publisher, Ms. Davis said. “They are stunned that they have not retained the copyrights,” she said. “They’re vehemently adamant” that they still have rights to the work.

Also, she added, faculty members sometimes add other scholars’ material to the repository, incorrectly assuming that this is allowed under fair use. —

Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office

From the University of Illinois Issues in Scholarly Communication Blog on December 13, 2006 --- http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/scholcomm/

Microsoft has created a free add-in that enables you to embed a Creative Commons copyright license into a document that you create using the Microsoft application Word, PowerPoint, or Excel. With a Creative Commons license, authors can express their intentions regarding how their works may be used by others.

To learn more about Creative Commons, please visit its web site, www.creativecommons.org. To learn more about the choices among the Creative Commons licenses, see http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/meet-the-licenses.

Download the Creative Commons Microsoft Office add-in from the Microsoft website. For a short URL to this resource, use this tinyURL:
http://tinyurl.com/y9y634

Installation of the Creative Commons Microsoft Office add-in will add an option to your File menu whereby you can easily add the CC logo and usage statement to your document.

Bob Jensen's threads on tools of the trade are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm

Patents can be obtained for most inventions and DNA discoveries,
but patenting tax plans borders on being rediculous

August 15, 2006 message from Scott Bonacker [aecm@BONACKER.US]

"Widgets, soft-drink formulas, new drugs: They can all be protected by patents. But did you ever think the clever tax-saving strategy your financial adviser is offering up could be patented as well? Don't dismiss the notion. Unauthorized use of a patented method might get you into hot water.

John Rowe, executive chairman of health insurer Aetna, knows that all too well. Within the past three years, at the suggestion of his advisers, Rowe set up two trusts and funded them with nonqualified stock options. An independent options valuation expert estimated their value for BusinessWeek at $28.5 million. Rowe's so-called grantor retained annuity trusts (GRATs) would pay him an annual income for a specific time and reserve whatever is left for family members. Plus, he could achieve dramatic gift-tax savings, says Carlyn McCaffrey, a lawyer with Weil, Gotshal & Manges in New York who is an expert on GRATs, though not involved in the case.

But in January, Rowe was sued in U.S. District Court in New Haven for patent infringement by Wealth Transfer Group, an Altamonte Springs (Fla.) firm that obtained a patent on this strategy in 2003. Apparently, the plaintiff learned of Rowe's GRATs when, as a corporate insider, he reported the transfer of the options.

Read the rest at: http://news.yahoo.com/s/bw/20060727/bs_bw/id20060726214792 

or when size matters:  http://tinyurl.com/qrnf8 

My impression is that as a matter of public policy patents on things like this shouldn't be granted, if indeed the underlying tax laws are worthy of passage by our legislators.

Scott Bonacker, CPA
Springfield, MO

Question
Is downloading of texts protected by "Fair Use" in U.S. Copyright Law (the DMCA)

"Georgia State: Downloading Texts is Fair Use," The University of Illinois Issues in Higher Education Blog, June 27, 2008 --- http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/scholcomm/

Many of us have been following the lawsuit three publishers have brought against Georgia State University for copyright infringement with great interest. In its response to the suit, Georgia State has now asserted that its online distribution of course material is permitted under copyright law's fair-use exemption. In papers filed earlier this week, the university admitted that it was offering the material online to students through electronic reserves in the library, the Blackboard/WebCT Vista course-management system, department Web pages, and other Web sites. But, it says the practice is allowed under the fair-use doctrine of the Copyright Act.

There is no clear interpretation of "Fair Use" relating to the amount of material that can be used for such activities as scholarship, teaching, reporting, and review.

In addition to advancing its fair-use argument, the university also says it is protected from federal lawsuits by sovereign immunity protections guaranteed by the 11th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The outcome of this lawsuit will impact the ways in which colleges and universities distribute course materials and provide access to digital materials.

Jensen Comment
The Fair Use safe harbors are frequently violated by professors who really do not want to know the limitations of these provisions in the law.July 3, 2008 reply from David Fordham, James Madison University [fordhadr@JMU.EDU]

This might be a good time to repeat this video on fair use.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJn_jC4FNDo

A full-screen version is available for download for your classes from:

http://snipurl.com/fairu1

This was put together by a law professor from Bucknell, and apparently is being distributed by Cyberlaw at Stanford University. Be sure to carefully read the pseudo-FBI warning at the beginning, too. Cute.

If I remember correctly, I believe this was posted on AECM on March 28 by Richard Campbell.

David Fordham

Question
Are you confused by the nuances of the "Fair Use" section of U.S. Copyright Law under the DMCA?

From the Issues in Scholarly Communications Blog at the University of Illinois on June 19, 2006 --- http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/scholcomm/

Good Fair Use Site

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law has created a Web site on fair use.

Called The Fair Use Network, the site says it attempts to alleviate the "mass of confusion for artists, scholars, journalists, bloggers, and everyone else who contributes to culture and political debate."

The site guides people on what to do if they get a letter from a copyright owner demanding that they cease and desist from making use of the owner's work. And the site also explains how much people can borrow, quote or copy from another's work.

Jensen Comment
The Fair Use safe harbors are frequently violated by professors who really do not want to know the limitations of these provisions in the law.

Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing of course materials by prestigious universities are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Question
How popular are these open sharing sites and what are the issues of copyrights?

June 26, 2006 message from Jagdish S. Gangolly [gangolly@INFOTOC.COM]

Bob,

I wanted to pitch for an article by my good friend and colleague, Terry Maxwell:

"Universities, Information Ownership, and Knowledge Communities"

The Journal of the Association of History and Computing http://www.mcel.pacificu.edu/JAHC/JAHCVII2/ARTICLES/maxwell/maxwell.html

Here is the teaser:

_________________________________________

The recent decision by MIT to post the information from all its 2,000 courses free to the Web has generated tremendous excitement online, with more than 42 million hits recorded in the first month, according to MIT statistics 1.

The project, entitled OpenCourseWare, was initiated by MIT professors and funded by $11 million in grants from two foundations. As of March, 2004, 700 courses, encompassing all five schools and two-thirds of the faculty on the Cambridge, Massachusetts campus, have been added to the site (ocw.mit.edu).

The project did not start as an effort to populate the information commons. On the contrary, in 1999, Robert Brown, MIT's provost, asked a faculty committee to study the idea for an online for-profit equivalent to the physical school.

However, after researching the issue, the faculty committee concluded that a profit-making venture was not viable, suggesting instead that the university and its faculty make its course material available for free online 2.

As reported by Charles Vest 2, the university's president, the OpenCourseWare initiative has had impacts both inside and outside the university. Within MIT, professors have begun using one another's materials to supplement their own teaching efforts, and are discovering interdisciplinary connections that could lead to new innovations inside the institution. Outside the university, MIT alumni, interested individuals, and other educators from around the world are using the courseware as a means to keep current in their fields and as models for new courses and curriculum.

The effort has generated interest in other areas, particularly among Intellectual Property legal commentators, who questioned the relationship between faculty-generated course notes and university property rights 3. Given the fact that the project is faculty-initiated and voluntary, intellectual property issues in the curricular area between the university and professors have not yet come to a head at MIT. However, the project has had to navigate the murky waters of copyright in other respects, particularly with regard to the negotiation for permissions with other information providers 4.

Nevertheless, the project still leaves open the question of the relative information rights of professors and universities.

In addition, it raises broader questions of the roles both of professional disciplines and the institutional structures developed to support them in a technological world in which traditional boundaries between information transformation, production, and dissemination are under strain. The following attempts to lay out some of the relevant issues, focusing particularly on the role of the university in an online world.

A Brief Look at the University in Society

Lying at the center of questions about university and academic information ownership is a deeply contested vision of the role of both scholarship and the institutions designed to support research. Do scholars labor primarily as individual authors and inventors, or are they members of what Enlightenment scholars termed a res publica, loosely defined as a republic of ideas operating beyond institutional and political boundaries? Are universities places of sanctuary for ideas, separated from the marketplace, or information dissemination institutions situated squarely in the market?

In her book "Who Owns Academic Work?," Corynne McSherry 5 traces the history of modern American universities and makes a strong case that these questions are largely unanswerable, because they assume a stability in self-conception that is historically missing. She argues that medieval universities and guilds were primarily envisioned as mechanisms for monopoly control over ideas, with the former focusing on professional control and the latter on control over invention. With the coming of the Enlightenment, voluntary academic societies sought to break down university monopolies on knowledge, constructing a meritocracy based on open communication and communal enquiry, and existing in cooperation with the growing commercial marketplace. At the institutional level, nineteenth-century German conceptions of the university, based on Kant's ideas in Conflict of the Faculties, envisioned the university as a place apart from the marketplace, yet poised to provide knowledge based on reason to political rulers. In the United States, German models of scholarly independence blended with the British tradition of liberal arts and informed citizenship, leading to a tension between disinterested scholarship and community. This admixture was further complicated by the presence of private schools funded through religious and other associations sitting cheek-and-jowl to land-grant public universities, developed to provide practical assistance in the development of new agricultural and mechanical techniques.

By the twentieth century, the split between theoretical and practical knowledge within universities was institutionalized through a separation of faculties of arts and science from engineering and professional school. At the same time, the continued compartmentalization of knowledge into disciplines supported the rise of self-contained academic communities with different standards of scholarship and practice.

To support the engagement of the university in the marketplace, during the 1920's several American universities, particularly those with large engineering components, inaugurated small offices dedicated to technology transfer, particularly the processing of patent applications for professors. However, in a major shift, the end of the Second World War saw a major increase in government grant programs for basic research, insulating the academy from a necessity to rely on private funding sources and enhancing the traditional notion of universities as the preferred site for basic objective research separate from the commercial marketplace. At the same time, a greater integration of the university into public life occurred, with the provision of GI Bill grants to returning members of the military. University enrollments doubled during the next 15 years, doubling again within another 8 years.

By the 1990s, the position of universities within society began to shift again. Federal funding for research slowed, along with other public financing sources. Pressure developed to seek private financing through partnerships with foundations and corporations. Universities undertook attempts at more aggressive management of intellectual assets, often bringing them into conflict with academic communities. The rise of the Internet signaled the potential for developing new resource streams through the development of online courses and degrees, but no one was sure where the dividing line stood between individual and institutional ownership of course materials.

Academic publishing, long a backwater in the publishing industry, showed strong growth and consolidation as publishers embraced electronic dissemination and new models of product bundling.

Here is another Terry Maxwell piece:

Toward a Model of Information Policy Analysis: Speech as an Illustrative Example by Terrence A. Maxwell FM10 Openness http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_6/maxwell/

Jagdish

Jagdish S. Gangolly
email: gangolly@infotoc.com

Fax: 831-584-1896
skype: gangolly
URL: www.infotoc.com
Blog: http://www.bloglines.com/blog/gangolly

Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing of course materials by prestigious universities are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

"Your Photos, Your Rights, and the Law: Answers to questions about copyright and your rights as a photographer," by Dave Johnson, PC World via The Washington Post, May 31, 2006 --- Click Here

Ironically, the answer to this simple question is not so simple anymore. But for almost any digital photo you take today, you can count on the copyright lasting for 70 years.

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that has pioneered a new way to share creative works. The group offers a number of licenses with names like Attribution, NoDerivs, NonCommercial, and ShareAlike.

If you choose to share your photos with a Creative Commons license, you're telling the world that you're offering to let other people use your photos in ways that are traditionally not supported by standard copyright law. Using an Attribution license, for example, is like releasing your photo in the public domain, though it requires anyone using your photo to give you credit. Attribution-NonCommercial is similar, but specifically prohibits people from using your photo for commercial use.

While using a Creative Commons license is a nice idea, and you'll find a lot of people using them on sites like Flickr.com, keep in mind that Creative Commons has no legal teeth. Only copyright law has that.

There are three ways to copyright a photo (or any other creative work).

Here's the easy way: Any work you create is automatically copyrighted. In other words, you don't need to do anything at all to receive some protection under copyright law.

However, there are copyrights--and then there are copyrights. While technically you never have to take action to copyright a creative work, simply putting a copyright notice on your work strengthens your copyright protection. To assert your claim to a digital photo, for example, just place a copyright notice somewhere on the picture. Commonly, photographers use the text tool in a photo editing program to do this in the lower-right corner.

The most aggressive copyright action you can take is to register your photo with the Registrar of Copyrights in Washington, DC. There is a form to fill out and a $30 fee to pay, but this approach provides you with the highest level of protection available. For more info go to the U.S. Copyright Office's Web site.

Continued in article

From Duke University
Arts Project:  Comics about video, academe, and the law --- http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/

“Will a spiky-haired, camera-toting super-heroine... restore decency and common sense to the world of creative endeavor?” -Paul Bonner, The Herald-Sun

“Bound By Law lays out a sparkling, witty, moving and informative story about how the eroded public domain has made documentary filmmaking into a minefield.” -Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing.net

“Bound by Law translates law into plain English and abstract ideas into ‘visual metaphors.’ So the comic's heroine, Akiko, brandishes a laser gun as she fends off a cyclopean 'Rights Monster' - all the while learning copyright law basics, including the line between fair use and copyright infringement.”

I learned about this from the Scholarly Communications blog at the University of Illinois on March 16, 2006 --- http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/scholcomm/

Bound by Law Duke Law School's Center for the Study of the Public Domain has just released "BOUND BY LAW?" - a comic book on copyright and creativity -- specifically, documentary film. It is being published today under a Creative Commons License. The comic, by Keith Aoki, James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins explores the benefits of copyright in a digital age, but also the threats to cultural history posed by a “permissions culture,” and the erosion of “fair use” and the public domain. Berkman Blog 3/15/06

Free digital versions are available here. http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/digital.html 

‘The Access Principle’
The book reviews the various models to bring the dissemination of knowledge online and to make it free, and along the way, the book criticizes plenty of publishing practices, copyright interpretations and scholarly traditions. John Willinsky, professor of language and literacy education at the University of British Columbia, has devoted much of his scholarship to the ideas behind the book. Among other things, he directs the Public Knowledge Project, which is financed by the Canadian government to promote the free exchange of information. Willinsky responded to questions about the themes of his book.
Scott Jaschik, "‘The Access Principle’," Inside Higher Ed, December 20, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/12/20/access

A computer scientist at Trinity University told me that a great source for legal studies of copyright and patent law is Eben Moglen at Columbia University --- http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/

He runs a blog called "Freedom Now" at http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/blog
Entries are relatively infrequent and date back to April 2000
There are also a few links to audio and video presentations.

From one of the leading law school advocates of open sharing
Many of Eben Moglen's papers on patents and copyrights can be downloaded from http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/

My good friend John Howland, a professor of computer science, recommends these particular papers for starters:

• The dotCommunist Manifesto
  http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/dcm.html
• The Invisible Barbeque
  http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/barbecue.html
• Anarchism Triumphant:  Free Software and the Death of Copyright
  http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/anarchism.html
• Freeing the Mind: Free Software and the Death of Proprietary Culture
  http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/maine-speech.html

Bob Jensen's threads on OKI ,DSpace, and SAKAI: Free sharing of courseware from MIT, Stanford, and other colleges and universities --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Duke Law & Technology Review --- http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/dltr/

Copyright Information and Dead Links

Copyright Information --- http://ejw.i8.com/copy.htm 

Journals Associations, 
Councils and Organizations 
Education 
General Issues 
Permission 
Intellectual Property 
Government Law 
Publishing Concerns 
Libraries and Copyright 
Mega Sites Music 
Dead Link Archive --- http://ejw.i8.com/copy.htm#dead 

DEAD LINK ARCHIVE 
For Dead Links, use Internet Archive to find a version of these sites. Highlight and copy the URL, then go to the Way Back Machine at http://www.archive.org/index.html  and then paste the URL into the web address box. Often icons are not available and the most recent listed version may not bring up the page. Go to an earlier date on the archive list for that site. Also, if you do not find it archived, try the Google Search Engine at http://www.google.com  and check their archive. Songwriter and Music Copyright Resources, http://www.npsai.com/resources.htm 

Bob Jensen's search helpers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm 

This message is from the Director of the Trinity University Library.

Bob Jensen

-----Original Message----- 
From: Graves, Diane J. 
Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2005 9:22 AM 
To: Trinity Faculty 

A number of you have asked about the legal use of copyrighted material on your websites and Blackboard courses. I just learned about this site, prepared at the CUNY Baruch College, which will help. It’s an interactive guide in a flow chart format that shows the steps you need to take to use copyrighted media in teaching. It’s very easy to follow.

http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/tutorials/copyright/ 

Both the library and IMS are providing links to this guide from our sites, but you might find it helpful to review it now and bookmark it for later use.

Diane

Diane J. Graves, Professor & University Librarian
Elizabeth M. Coates Library, Trinity University
One Trinity Place, San Antonio, TX 78212

February 2, 2005 reply from Dr. Jagdish Pathak [jagdish@UWINDSOR.CA] 

I liked the presentation. It opened in my lotus notes browser without any problem. It is knowledge enhancing and equally enjoyable stuff!

Jagdish Pathak, PhD 
Guest Editor- Managerial Auditing Journal (Special Issue) 
Accounting Systems & IT Auditing Faculty 
Accounting & Audit Area 
Odette School of Business 
University of Windsor 
401 Sunset Windsor, N9B 3P4, ON Canada

February 3, 2005 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu] 

COPYRIGHT AND LEARNING

"Like evil trolls guarding the gates, the copyright controllers are trying to hold sway over our actions and create walled gardens around knowledge repositories so that they can maintain full control over who uses applications or accesses content and when, where, and how they use it."

In "Stealing the Goose: Copyright and Learning" (IRRODL, November 2004) Rory McGreal calls for taking back education's "fair use" and "fair dealing" rights that are in jeopardy as some intellectual property owners seek to tighten control and maximize profits. The article is available online at http://www.irrodl.org/content/v5.3/mcgreal.html 

International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL) [ISSN 1492-3831] is a free, refereed ejournal published by Athabasca University - Canada's Open University. 

For more information, contact Paula Smith, IRRODL Managing Editor; tel: 780-675-6810; fax: 780-675-672; email: irrodl@athabascau.ca ; Web: http://www.irrodl.org/ 

Money Can Buy You Anything You Want in the U.S. Senate
You May Go to Jail for Taping and Skipping
No Fair Going to the Refrigerator During Commercials
As early as this week, the Senate may try to quickly pass a bill that would radically change copyright law in favor of Hollywood and the music industry. One provision: Skipping commercials would be illegal. Michael Grebb reports from Washington.
Wired News, November 16, 2004 --- http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,65704,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2 

A number of influential lawyers, scholars and activists are increasingly concerned that copyright law is curbing our freedoms and making it harder to create anything new. This could be the first new social movement of the century.

"The Tyranny of Copyright?" by Robert S. Boynton, New York Times Magazine, January 25, 2004 ---  http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/magazine/25COPYRIGHT.html 

Unfortunately for the students, their actions ran afoul of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (D.M.C.A.), one of several recent laws that regulate intellectual property and are quietly reshaping the culture. Designed to protect copyrighted material on the Web, the act makes it possible for an Internet service provider to be liable for the material posted by its users -- an extraordinary burden that providers of phone service, by contrast, do not share. Under the law, if an aggrieved party (Diebold, say) threatens to sue an Internet service provider over the content of a subscriber's Web site, the provider can avoid liability simply by removing the offending material. Since the mere threat of a lawsuit is usually enough to scare most providers into submission, the law effectively gives private parties veto power over much of the information published online -- as the Swarthmore students would soon learn.

Continued in the article

Dentists in Canada discover they have to pay fees to Canadian music publishers for the right to play copyright music in their offices. U.S. dentists may be surprised to find out that similar rules apply in their country.
Katie Dean, Wired News, August 2, 2004 --- http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,64397,00.html?tw=newsletter_topstories_html 
Bob Jensen's threads on the DMCA are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright 

November 29, 2004 message from Diane Graves

You may have already heard of the Creative Commons licenses, but if not, take a look at this site: http://creativecommons.org/  Creative Commons licenses allow the author/creator to retain some rights, but don’t lock down the rights the way the traditional copyright agreements do. Here is how the site describes the options: “With a Creative Commons license, you keep your copyright but allow people to copy and distribute your work provided they give you credit -- and only on the conditions you specify here. If you want to offer your work with no conditions, choose the public domain.” You may want to look at the EDUCATION section on the site: http://creativecommons.org/education/ 

The Creative Commons has been enormously successful since it debuted in 2001. It has the potential to be very helpful in the higher education arena; it is already in use at MIT’s Open CourseWare and DSpace projects and at Rice University’s Connexions Project.

I encourage you to browse through the Creative Commons site and think about how you could use their licensing options with your own work. It’s an exciting development with the potential to revolutionize the way we share information in higher education.

Diane

P.S. Here are two short videos that describe the philosophy behind the Creative Commons: http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/ 

Diane J. Graves, Professor & University Librarian
Elizabeth M. Coates Library, Trinity University
One Trinity Place , San Antonio , TX 78212
email: diane.graves@trinity.edu

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