Obama “Hope” Image vs. One Lost Shepard

Another day, another Fair Use issue in the headlines. After working with my graduate students over the past six months I’m left with the feeling that most of them approach the subject of copyright as something that the big media companies hold over their heads, preventing them from using the music that they want in their videos or images on their websites. It’s an eye-opening experience for them to realize that there are options for them to use, such as creative commons, where they can find quality media and stay well clear of the gray area that is copyright law. Good times. I cover copyright and Fair Use over two sessions every month and by the end everyone knows that Fair Use is not a right but can be used as a defense if/when one is sued for a copyright violation. Or course none of my students want to be anywhere near a court, having to defend themselves versus some scary media conglomerate.

Then the last week of February, as if I needed a textbook case on Fair Use, I stumbled across an NPR interview of the artist, Shepherd Fairey, who was behind President Obama’s “Hope” poster that rose to iconic status during the election. Seems that the Associated Press was threatening to sue Fairey for the use of the photograph that he used to create his poster. Just before NPR ran the story Fairey decided to beat AP to the punch and sue AP claiming that his use of the photo was covered under Fair Use. To make things even more complicated, the photographer, Mannie Garcia, is suing AP claiming that he was a freelancer and not an AP employee when he shot the disputed photo and therefore he is entitled to compensation from this litigation. Let’s say it together: Fair Use is not a right but a defensible position. Again, Fair Use is not a right but a defensible position.

I asked photographer and TWiT contributer, Scott Bourne, his take on the case (via Twitter) and he said, Read more

Share this Post[?]

Copyright This!

Since the very first month of teaching my graduate media course at Full Sail University my students have struggled with the vagueness and conflicting messages surrounding the topics of copyright and fair use. Tasking educators, many of whom are very new to online anything, to creating an unending number of audio podcasts, videos, blog entries and assorted media projects and then telling them that they cannot use any images, music or videos that they might find on the Internet is like inviting them to a party and then telling them that they are not permitted to having any fun. it’s downright confusing. Then for me to try to be authoritative on what is permitted and not permitted, while knowing that the subjects of copyright and fair use are life-work of an army of lawyers and policy makers, makes the whole thing downright silly.

So after one of our class sessions, one of my more media savvy students made the following comment in his blog:
Read more

Share this Post[?]

Relevant Media vs. Cool Stuff – Online Learners Pick the Former

One of my students recently wrote about his experiences as an online curriculum development person who works for an online university that has a division that partners with traditional higher-ed institutions to help them bring graduate programs online. He noted that the upper management was all crazy about stuffing as much media into every course, then joked that they were much less energetic about paying for the media or what it takes to create it. That’s kind’a typical. Then he made the following comment about student usage of this media content:

Careful analysis of click-tracking data is showing that only around 50% of the students are actually watching the media elements integrated into the courses. We are trying to understand the reasons why students aren’t watching the media. Sometimes, it is clear that they are just not seeing the value in the media pieces. And admittedly, not all the media is uniformly excellent. However, we are also finding that our online students are incredibly task-focused. They do exactly what they need to do to complete the assignments and nothing more. As an online student myself, I guess I understand that one! (d. lungren)

My words of wisdom to this student:
Read more

Share this Post[?]

Broke Bookends

Remember how impressed I was last time when I was using online research tools? Yeah, in the meantime I’ve run headlong into a less than amazing experience. I went so far as to pay for the upgrade of my copy of Bookends, only to get weird error messages when it can’t read PDFs and doesn’t seem to work with my school’s online databases. Damn. I’ll probably continue to use Zotero and RefWorks to gather data and we’ll see how I might get the data into my documents. Ack.

Share this Post[?]

Papers

I got my papers a few weeks back & finally turned them in. sad [Sound of a door closing behind me]

Share this Post[?]

Circles Within Circles – Running into FS Ads

Went looking for information about local Macintosh user groups and thought to begin by visiting the website of one of my favorite mac-macs, Lesa Snyder King. She had several user groups listed but none within striking distance from my domicile. Damn. So while I cruising about the website looking for info I stumble upon the ad list here to the right. Yeah. My school Full Sail has an ad on Lesa’s site. I was jazzed and jealous. It was in her Google ad-sense so there’s no “making it happen.” Anyway, it felt like seein’ a friend on TV. You point, make a funny sound and then move on when no one thinks it’s as cool as you do. Oh well, I guess I’m too easily amused. [sigh] Share this Post[?]

Almost Painless RSS

I live in my email app and my browser, but don’t expect me to visit your site everyday just to check to see if you have new info. One of the reasons I like Twitter and spend more time on Facebook is because they come to me and tell me when new content is posted. Expecting me or worse, trying to force me to come to your site to check for new content feels too much like Web 1.0 to me. Strangely, even with this attitude and my constant need to have a sense of what’s going on in Tech & the World, I’ve never bothered to use the one tool specifically set up to bring the news to the user: RSS (see the video below for a complete explanation of RSS). I’ve gotten away with using Twitter as a kind of RSS feed. Along with the podcasters, I also subscribed to CNN, Ars Technica, and the AP. And having the constant flow of data along the left pane of my browser or easily accessible on my phone works just fine for me. Alas, things probably would have stayed that way were I not now tasked with tracking the musings, thoughts and frustrations of my 57 students scattered among 57 blogs. Damn. So I put out the call today amongst my learned colleagues for their choice in RSS apps and the stumbled upon a solution right under my nose.

Read more

Share this Post[?]

Zotero & RefWorks: Damn Web-Based Apps that Work

I’ve been going at it all day, one tutorial after another, pausing to answer student queries online and then moving on to the next item in the EBSCO/ERIC search. I’ve been experimenting with Zotero and RefWorks and my mind has been continually amazed that I can so easily import library citations (with full articles) so easily. I go back to the days of cryptic notecards, piles and piles of books, several hundred dollars in photo-copied journals and articles and an f-ing typewriter. Screw this business of clueless high school students and undergrads copying and pasting right out of Wikipedia. From the comfort of my apartment with Steve Miller playing loudly on iTunes and enjoyng whatever beverage I might choose, I have access to the collected works, wisdom and musings of our entire species. Yeah, I know that was the original idea when DARPA began to put what would become the Internet together. I guess I’m a bit overwhelmed that the damn thing actually works almost as promised. How often does that happen with technology. Right. Never. I’m just wondering how these online tools might work with the writing/organizing tool that I’ve used most over the past years, Circus Ponies’ Notebook.
Read more

Share this Post[?]

Reading Redesigned Continues: Kindle2 & Big Rocks from the Sky

Amazon’s Kindle 2 has begun arriving in happy gadget freak’s homes this week. Announced on February 9th by Amazon.com founder, Jeff Bezos, the Kindle 2 is reported to have cleaned up some of the style-points that version one suffered from with a thinner, lighter device and boosted internal memory from 512 MB to 2 GB. But the $359 price that Amazon is keeping for the device, many tech writers say it’s still way too high and will get in the way of the device taking off. But now that the devices are showing up, the geek pull toward shiny electronics seems to be taking hold. I know I’m feeling it.

Following the initial announcement the crew at CNET’s Buzz-Out-Loud podcast noted that it was very Apple-like in it’s form, verbiage and “message” control. The promo video/commercial (above) that I saw on Engadget certainly reminded me of an Apple ad. Question is whether Amazon is going to make the same Apple made 25 years ago when they assumed that everyone would pay extra for a revolutionary device (in Apple’s case the original Macintosh). That mistake almost spelled the end of Apple and we would have missed out on all of the revolutionary things Apple has done since then. As an educator and technologist I see a potential with the Kindle that we cannot afford to miss. And it goes way past the Kindle being a shiny new technology thing.

Read more

Share this Post[?]

YouTube is for Edumacashun

When Internet Anthropologist, Michael Wesch, popularized the notion that YouTube was essentially about people teaching other people “stuff” he probably didn’t have the following video tutorials in mind:

Share this Post[?]

Next Page »