A grey and contested area!

I’ve recently sought advice from a couple of fellow media educators regarding the legality of posting copyrighted audio and video material to sites on the internet such as YouTube, TeacherTube and blogs.

The first to reply was the Chief Examiner of A level Media Studies for a leading English awarding body and Head of Media Studies at a sixth form college widely regarded as a centre of excellence for the subject. As the Media Studies department at the college in question has posted a lot of copyrighted material on their website over the years, I wondered what their position on this issue was. Here is the reply I received:

It does infringe copyright, but in practice the worst that is likely to
happen is someone notifies YouTube and they shut down your account.

We have never had a problem with using music (e.g. for music video made
by kids) and as far as I am aware no-one has ever been prosecuted here
or in the US for it. Uploading clips you have ripped from DVD again is
unlikely to result in a problem, but as we discovered this year, can
result in your account being shut down; ours went when the BPI objected
to a clip ripped from the Brit awards programme which we had uploaded.
We had to start again from scratch and re-upload all videos.

My advice would be to carry on with kids’ work, but don’t use the same
account if you upload something you have ripped from elsewhere!

Further advice from a University lecturer in Media studies was as follows:

This is a grey and contested area and I am not a media lawyer (I would have a much bigger house and a car that is not literally falling to bits) so this is conjecture and not binding legal advice…

Having said all that, copyright law recognises a degree of educational purpose across the range of printed and media material. A number of sites have explanations for staff and students on this. I think that this is the statute that (the practitioner above) quotes and goes by:

“Sound and videorecordings and broadcasts may be copied for the making of a film or film sound-track by students and/or academic staff involved in the course of instruction, or of preparation for instruction, in the making of films or film sound-tracks. Note, this copying may only be done by the tutor(s) or the student(s) involved in the course.”

This quote is from Staffordshire University’s exhaustive library pages at http://www.staffs.ac.uk/legal/copyright/

educational_purposes/

This does not cover the uploading of any created, repurposed material to the web. On the other hand you are not exactly selling it on by displaying it for students to critique (or whatever). The case for educational use is usually made on the grounds of not-for-profit or resale and academic purposes only. So long as the college would not be compiling them and selling them on as a DVD (which would be a cast iron case for prosecution I reckon) then posting them for a while on your site ought to be OK.  If push comes to shove and an agent of whatever film company spots re-used copyright material, the usual recourse is to a letter or other communication requiring the removal of the material. So long as you have maintained control over that material and you can take it down if you need to, I think you would be covered. If you left it there, you might be sued!  As far as I know, (the practitioner above) retains control of the postings and could remove them.  I’m unaware of him ever having any difficulty with this.

Materials made available to you through the Creative Archive (BBC, Channel 4 etc) are explicitly available for use in the special Creative Archive agreement which can be found here: http://www.teachers.tv/creativearchive

BECTA has some further sorces of info here http://schools.becta.org.uk/index.php?section=is&catcode=ss_to_es_pp_le_03&rid=14159

So there we have it. A grey and contested area indeed!

Why We (Sometimes Don’t) Blog

It’s been nearly two weeks since my last post here, so what’s my excuse, and why, strangely, do I feel I need one?

As a state secondary school teacher, my students and I are still very much tied to the old world of paper exams, whose high season is now. As long as students’ future education opportunities and my level of pay depend on the outcome of such exams, they will continue to push more reflective activities to the margins.

But why do I feel the need to explain this? Perhaps because the public nature of blogging seems to generate a sense of duty and obligation towards one’s potential audience, however small one’s “stats” show it to be.

In Why We Blog by Bonnie Nardi et al. (http://darrouzet-nardi.net/bonnie/pdf/Nardi_why_we_blog.pdf), the sense of an audience is clearly central to the motivation of bloggers within each of the five (“not exhaustive” and “by no means mutually exclusive”) categories that they discovered in their research (otherwise, why not just write a private journal?). As “one of those people for whom writing and thinking are basically synonymous”, I strongly identify with those bloggers quoted in the “Blog As Muse” section of the article. To acknowledge an audience’s ability “to shape the writing” is, more importantly, to acknowledge their ability to shape the thinking, or, as Will Richardson puts it, “push my thinking further” (see earlier post: http://muso1.wordpress.com/2008/05/11/from-journaling-to-blogging/). For this reason alone, I can see myself blogging in one form or another in the future. 

Educational Blocking

This week I’ve had to read and reflect on the following two articles for my MA course:

Blogging to Learn by Anne Bartlett-Bragg (http://knowledgetree.flexiblelearning.net.au

/edition04/pdf/Blogging_to_Learn.pdf)

Educational Blogging by Stephen Downes (http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM0450.pdf).

Bartlett-Bragg’s presentation of her 5-Stage Blogging Process as something that has “been informed and developed from practice and not theory” seems to provide the sort of encouragement educators need to embrace blogs within (their) pedagogical practices” without waiting over-cautiously for some kind of foolproof “Idiot’s Guide” to come along which will have done all the thinking and risk-taking for them. It seems clear that we must resist the temptation to keep “getting ready” and just “get going”, however “swamped” we may feel by the often confusing mass of “new technology options” which are now becoming available to us. If we are to successfully encourage students to “shift from surface to deeper levels of learning”, we must surely lead by example and model what it means to be “active individuals, wholly present, engaging with others, and open to challenge”. I only hope, whilst “walking across the desert”, that we are able to discriminate between truly nourishing oases and the many time-wasting, strength-sapping mirages.

Despite his obvious enthusiasm for educational blogging, Downes rightly points to a key “dilemma for educators”, namely, the problem of how to encourage “free-flowing”, “unconstrained”, “authentic”, “reflective” and “engaged” intellectual conversation within institutional contexts which necessarily involve prescription, monitoring, censorship and grading. How, for instance, are we to enable the sort of “quality linking” essential to this “new realm of human communication” if access to Web 2.0 sites – such as YouTube – and any sites with the word “blog” in the address is blocked, as in my own Local Education Authority? If blogging is, as Ken Smith claims, “writing down what you think when you read others” and having others “write down what they think when they read you”, such restricted access can only weaken the potential of educational blogging to motivate and engage our students in their own learning process.

From journaling to blogging

The adolescent search for self led me to journaling in my late teens and early twenties, for which I gained inspiration and guidance from the likes of Ira Progoff (http://www.amazon.co.uk/At-Journal-Workshop-Unconscious-Workbooks/dp/0874776384/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210499919&sr=1-1), Tristine Rainer (http://www.amazon.co.uk/New-Diary-Self-guidance-Expanded-Creativity/dp/0874771501/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210499952&sr=1-1) and Joanna Field/Marion Milner (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Life-Ones-Own-Joanna-Field/dp/0860688216/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210499636&sr=8-2).

Journaling featured again in my teacher training (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Reflection-Turning-Experience-into-Learning/dp/0850388643/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210500643&sr=1-1), during which the importance of being a “Reflective Practitioner” was stressed (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Reflective-Practitioner-Professionals-Think-Action/dp/1857423194/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b?ie=UTF8&qid=1210500643&sr=1-1). Even now, my instinct is to turn to the form of the reflective journal in order to get my bearings and a sense of perspective in times of major transition in my life.

So what’s the difference between journaling and blogging? Will Richardson has some interesting thoughts on this subject (http://weblogg-ed.com/2005/blogging-vs-journalingagain/#comments). He seems to get to the heart of the matter in this extract from an earlier post (http://weblogg-ed.com/2004/05/07/):

Weblogs don’t change the “Here’s what I did today” type stuff. I can journal on paper or in a dozen other ways. Journaling in a blog opens us up to a wider audience, no doubt. And that in itself may change the way we write when we journal. But bottom line, it’s not decidedly different from what I can already do.

And I don’t need a Weblog to deliver or collect assignments or share links; it certainly facilitates that kind of work, but it’s not a requirement.

But I’ve never in my life written the way I write in this Weblog. And frankly, I don’t know that I’ve learned as much from any other type of activity as I have from this type. And I learn when I’m doing just what I’m doing now (sweat on brow). I’m not journaling. I’m not just linking. I’m attempting to synthesize a lot of disparate ideas from a variety of sources into a few coherent sentences that I can publish for an audience and wait (hope?) for its response to push my thinking further. That’s the essence of blogging to me, and I can’t do it without a Weblog. That’s the distinction. That’s what tells me this is different. And that’s what makes me think so hard about the effects that blogging, not just using a blog, might have in a classroom.

If we’ve been blogging without Weblogs in schools all along, then just put me out of my misery now. But I don’t think we have.

Information Overload

Although I’ve spent several hours today following one fascinating link after another, I haven’t really digested everything sufficiently for the long post I’d hoped to write. I should probably abandon the idea of long posts altogether and just make more regular short ones.

In the meantime, it’s nice to remember that I’m not the only one concerned about IO:

http://www.managingio.com/2008/02/24/

internet-resources-on-information-overload-and-productivity/

http://www.digitalnative.org/wiki/Main_Page

The Great Seduction

Another unintentional encounter with the work of Andrew Keen.

On Googling “Neil Postman+Web 2.0″ (intrigued by what the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death might have had to say on the current state of our “internet culture” if he had lived to see it), the first link I was given took me here: http://andrewkeen.typepad.com/the_great_seduction

/2006/06/where_have_you_.html.

“The Great Seduction” which Keen seems to be warning us against is not Web 2.0 tools themselves – he is not a Luddite – rather the widespread idea that the “the wisdom of the crowd”, disseminated via such tools, is as equally valid as the wisdom of rigorous scholarship and genuine expertise. “Media literacy is the key in this new age” he states in a keynote speech linked to the above page (http://www.oeb-docs.com/oeb-videos/speeches-07/oeb07_andrew-keen.mp3); in the face of ”the democratization of knowledge”, discrimination skills are going to be more important than ever.

The Cult of the Amateur

Whilst ordering a recommended book for my MA, The Rough Guide to Blogging, on Amazon this morning, I noticed that “Customers who bought this item also bought…”, amongst other things, Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cult-Amateur-Internet-Killing-Assaulting/dp/1857883934/ref=pd_rhf_p_t_2). Interesting, especially as I’d only really become consciously aware of Andrew Keen for the first time yesterday via his column for The Independent. Perhaps I should follow this up, especially as I’m now, I suppose, in danger of becoming a member of this cult myself!

Hello world!

Welcome to my first ever blog, begun as part of an MA module entitled Internet Cultures at the Institute of Education in London. Over the next few weeks I’ll be “musing” on issues to do with what’s come to be called Web 2.0. But what exactly is that? Here’s one answer.