Explaining Fair Use, Copyright

The Duke Law School has decided to use a new approach to explain some challenging concepts – copyright and fair use. The idea is to embed core ideas within the story line of a comic book. The storyline follows the adventures of a filmmaker and her struggles with the reality of fair use. The link I provide offers access to a paper and Flash version.

Library of Congress Workshop

Resource produced by the Center for the Study of the Public Domain.

See Andy Carvin’s Waste of Bandwidth for a more detailed account. It was his post that brought this resource to me attention. Andy’s post contains some additional information regarding the sharing of resources across blogs and the license that allows such sharing.

An aside – encountering an example of an online comic is timely for me. I gave an exam in my grad EdTech class a week ago containing a question that asked students to evaluate the potential of an online comic book as a multimedia format for presenting complex ideas. The question was more focused on some of the multiple media vs. multiple modality issues raised by Mayer. The examples in his research articles looked like the panels from a comic book to me. So, for my students who also follow my blog, the idea was not as unrealistic as you thought.

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Podcasting from Conferences

I don’t know about you, but there is a limit on the number of conferences I can attend. I have a limited budget, I live a long way from most places, and I have other obligations in terms of time. I value the opportunity to access conference content from my desktop. Pocasts from the 2006 CUE conference make a great example. I would not make the trip to California for such an event, but I welcome the opportunity to listen and watch.

I started to think about this situation from the perspective of the presenter. The individuals I have in mind are those professional presenters who seem to move from conference to conference as invited presenters or keynotes. I do see some of these individuals often enough to recognize that some of them have one or two interesting ideas and others think more broadly and tend to consistently have new things to say. It is the individuals with a specific focus I wonder about. They become less interesting when I have listened to the same idea a couple of times. Do you think they object to the recording and dissemination of their “canned” presentation? Perhaps if you accept a fee, expectations change.

What about those presenters who pay a conference registration fee and present for free? Some of the podcast advocates I listened to by way of the CUE link noted the increasing frequency with which they see individuals with ipods and mikes recording sessions. Under what situations might this be inappropriate? I would think that podcasting a presentation without consent would be inappropriate. While often the presenter would probaby not object, if you intend to share a recording, I would think the proper thing to do would be to ask.

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Digital Universe

eSchool News describes the effort to develop a new information source called the Digital Universe. The resource appears to aspire to be a higher quality version of something like wikipedia. Individuals will have the opportunity to contribute, but provisions have been built in from the beginning for greater supervision of resource development provided by “stewards.” It appears some, but not all resources will be available at no cost. I see that Dr. Lawrence Lessig, Chairman of the Creative Commons Project, is a member of the board of advisors.

Presently, the Digital Universe exists as a grand plan, a general structure, and a few examples. It will be interesting to contrast this venture with wikipedia and perhaps to see how Google responds to both should these ventures take off. Not certain I understand the funding model at this point, but corporate and individual donations are a part.

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Spyware Study

One of my favorite “sources” on all things digital is Leo Laporte (of TechTV fame). I listen to his TWIT podcast whenever possible.

In support of his preference for FireFox in comparison to IE, Leo described a University of Washington study on spyware. I searched Google for the University of Washington and spyware and found descriptions of the study. The “executive summary” (the link I provide) outlines how frequent spyware seems to be based on the research and describes the types of sites that seem most likely to distribute spyware. The full study (available in pdf form) gets into the issue of browsers.

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iLife Podcasting

I like the new iLife ’06 suite. My latest experiment made use of Garageband to generate a podcast (focused on social bookmarking if you care to give a listen).

Garageband has a special podcasting “track”, allows images to be brought in from iPhoto as chapter art (see image below or the sample above), and publishes to iWeb or iTunes.
Library of Congress Workshop

Now, I need to work on my “fm” voice. There were some options for manipulating voice characteristics so I will have to experiment with sound quality next. It appears there are options for sounding mellow, but nothing available should I want to sound exciting.

EduBlog post on a similar topic.

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Tech slows productivity?

C|NET News has an interesting piece on the ways technology REDUCES our work efficiency – too many demands, too many options, too many distractions, and way too much time writing blog entries.
Maybe the issue should really be the blurring of that line dividing work and life. The line “I have a life …” has become my favorate annoyance. The utterance is often used to explain why a task has yet to be completed or why an interesting opportunity is being ignored. It is almost as if work is something that is a nuisance and the required activities should be dispatched as quickly as possible. So, while I do listen to Internet radio or an audiobook while I work and that probably reduces my productivity a bit, I also answer email while at home because I assume the person who sent the note would prefer a rapid reply. The total time involved is greater and the productivity per minute might be lower but that is fine with me.

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