The AERA conference offers us the opportunity to meet with our editor and to discuss issues related to our next book edition. Because we write about the use of technology in learning, we feel the need to push for a different kind of instructional content. We intend to generate a hybrid product that combines a scaled down book – we prefer to call it a Primer – and online resources. There are challenges in doing this. We are exploring what we think is the best way to offer content for our topic – the uses of technology in teaching and learning. However, separating content between a book and online can be tricky as it may appear the intent is to prevent resale of books. We certainly understand this issue as it applies to book resale, but what is the strategy when the online content is separated because some content really is not best experienced on the page.
The other issue we constantly encounter and we guess few consumers understand involves permissions. We all constantly encounter and may personally generate online instructional resources that involve screen captures or screencasts. YouTube, blogs, and web pages offer many resources containing such useful resources. The reality is that the screen captures and screencasts appearing within these resources are almost always used without permission and are a violation of copyright. When you purchase a commercial product the authors and developers cannot operate in this fashion. They must make the effort to secure permission to use the imagery. In our experience, payments have seldom been required, but the legal requirement requires time commitments from company personnel. Once you must involve lawyers, costs go up. So, to explain the situation in a simple way – it costs more to offer a resource that meets legal requirements. We intend to heavily focus our online resources on classroom examples and tutorials and so to offer what we believe to be most helpful we have the added burden of dealing with the issue of cost and permissions.
