Open Content

(c) Express Syndication LTD, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, carl Gile, Daily Express, 1981.

In my last post, I said that the power of the Creative Commons licensing was it's simplicity of use for the creator and re-user of a work.  While this is true in some instances, challenges still abound.  One issue is that educational resources rarely exist in a vacuum. I recently attended a workshop on Open Educational Resources for Higher Education and one of the presentations was about a University that had received grant money to license some of their courses as OER using creative commons.  What they found was that it took a tremendous amount of work to check each and every aspect of the course to make sure it could actually be licensed this way.  In many cased there were questions about photos or graphics used in presentations.  Questions arose about the ownership of work done by academic staff. They needed buy-in at every level of the institution to succeed.

One issue arises from the fact that teaching already uses all kinds of content is already considered free or open in some form or fashion.  There are a lot of cases that could be considered grey or fuzzy about what a license actually allows, especially when it comes to non-commercial, educational use, not to mention fair use in the US. Don't think that you can clear this up by asking a lawyer either, the IP lawyer in attendance at the workshop was practically reduced to speaking in riddle.

David Wiley calls material that is in allowed to re-used to some degree Open Content and that is one of the topics covered in the Introduction to Openness in Education course that has just started.

In practice, what it comes down to is that if someone wants to stop you from using their copyrighted material, they will take (or more likely start by threatening to take) legal action against you. In my opinion, this puts the burden on us all to exercise our rights if for no other reason than to map these legal boundaries. There are clearly some cases that are morally wrong- to profit from someone else's work to their detriment is a clear example.  For non-commercial use, it's hard to see the harm and for educational use it easy to see some good. The question becomes about risk and, unfortunately, Universities are likely to be very risk averse.

One other consideration in an educational setting is modelling behaviour for the students.  However, I think this applies both to a respect for the law as well as need to civically engage, exercise rights and challenge unjust and unfair law.

So, a real world example is the cartoon above which is copyrighted but has been cleared for educational use by the British Cartoon Archive.  The fuzzy area is when you try to determine exactly how educational use is defined. Think about these examples of use and try to figure out where to draw the educational use line:

• a teacher shows the cartoon to a class during a lecture
• that lecture is put on the VLE for the students to download
• the lecture is recorded and the video is put onto Itunes U. or Youtube Ed
• the cartoon is posted on the schools public website
• The instructor's presentation is put onto slideshare
• a student uses the cartoon the in their own blog (which is about their studies and even part of an assessed project)

The biggest issue would seem to come down to possible commercial use of the photo. I'm the student in the last example, and I'm relatively certain that this is an appropriate use (especially given the nature of the comic!) but it is certainly possible that Express Syndication LTD could disagree.

There are plenty of really interesting dimensions of these issue to explore such as the history and purpose of copyright in the first place, the way the issue is impacting the music, film, and publishing industries, the tension between artists rights and corporations who often hold the copyrights of the artists work, and other examples of strange enforcement and challenge of it.  For now, I want to just give one more example that follows very nicely along the theme of the cartoon.

No image uploaded here, just using a url

Just in case you live under a rock, the Far Side is a comic strip created by Gary Larson and which, according to wikipedia, "was carried by more than 1,900 daily newspapers, translated into 17 languages, and collected into calendars and 22 compilation books.[1]"

First off, let me say that Larson is a hero and has probably brought as many smiles and laughs into this world as is humanly possible. For over a decade you could barely find a school hallway or refrigerator that wasn't adorned by his fabulous work.

Wikipedia also says "It is difficult to find many Far Side cartoons online, since Larson, his publishers, and lawyers have successfully persuaded people not to infringe on his copyright." Which is absolute rubbish since if you do a google image search for the farside, almost all the images that come up for first several pages are his comics, and even on page 20 it's still about half and half. The persuasion bit refers to the following letter:

I'm walking a fine line here.

On the one hand, I confess to finding it quite flattering that some of my fans have created web sites displaying and / or distributing my work on the Internet. And, on the other, I'm struggling to find the words that convincingly but sensitively persuade these Far Side enthusiasts to "cease and desist" before they have to read these words from some lawyer.

What impact this unauthorized use has had (and is having) in tangible terms is, naturally, of great concern to my publishers and therefore to me -- but it's not the focus of this letter. My effort here is to try and speak to the intangible impact, the emotional cost to me, personally, of seeing my work collected, digitized, and offered up in cyberspace beyond my control.

Years ago I was having lunch one day with the cartoonist Richard Guindon, and the subject came up how neither one of us ever solicited or accepted ideas from others. But, until Richard summed it up quite neatly, I never really understood my own aversions to doing this: ''It's like having someone else write in your diary, he said. And how true that statement rang with me . In effect, we drew cartoons that we hoped would be entertaining or, at the very least, not boring; but regardless, they would always come from an intensely personal, and therefore original perspective.

To attempt to be "funny" is a very scary, risk-laden proposition. (Ask any stand-up comic who has ever "bombed" on stage.) But if there was ever an axiom to follow in this business, it would be this: be honest to yourself and -- most important -- respect your audience.

So, in a nutshell (probably an unfortunate choice of words for me), I only ask that this respect be returned, and the way for anyone to do that is to please, please refrain from putting The Far Side out on the Internet. These cartoons are my "children," of sorts, and like a parent, I'm concerned about where they go at night without telling me. And, seeing them at someone's web site is like getting the call at 2:00 a.m. that goes, "Uh, Dad, you're not going to like this much, but guess where I am."

I hope my explanation helps you to understand the importance this has for me, personally, and why I'm making this request.

Please send my "kids" home. I'll be eternally grateful. 

Most respectfully, 
Gary Larson

Educational Simulations

Photo curtesy of Torley via flickr

I just finished the two sessions about designing simulations for education and training that Clark Aldrich presented for week 12 of the #change11 mooc.  This topic is almost completely new to me and Clark's expertise and passion provided a great introduction.

One of the main points that resonated with me is when he said to "align delivery of content with the importance of content." Clark said this in the context of simulations which generally require a lot of resources to develop and therefore make sense for important content but it seems to be good advice for learning design in general.

Quite a bit of the presentation revolved around the project management aspects of designing simulations.  Here also, I think that a lot can be generalized to any kind of large project. For example, he talked about how there is direct correlation between having numerous high level decision makers and increases in project cost (in time and money) which is probably true for most projects.

In thinking about the role of simulations in education, I can't help but feel that there's an inevitability to much greater usage of sims as time goes on. In part this is due to Moores Law and the exponential acceleration of computing technology.  Partly it may be that I've read a bit too much science fiction.

One thing that sims really seem to have going for them is their scalability.  Although they are resource intensive to produce, once deployed, the cost of delivery becomes very small. This means that if you are designing something for a very large number of students, then cost per student could be very low, even for something very sophisticated.

Another advantage that Clark touched on several times was that it can be very fun and engaging.  I would argue that a good teacher can also be fun and engaging but sims have an edge when it comes to reproducing this effect and scaling up. A sim requires talent to be made engaging but only once whereas the engaging teacher has to keep trying day after day and will inevitably have good days and bad days.

I think there is an underlying claim that sims tend to be inherently fun and I wonder how true this is. I grew up playing video games, mostly for fun but also some that were educational.  We had the the game Oregon Trail in my 6th grade classroom and by it's nature it definitely had a powerful attraction that led lot's of learning.  By todays standards, that game is primitive-- would it still have that attraction to kids that are growing up with smart phones, ubiquitous PCs and a plethora of gaming consoles? Is the attractive quality of a sim a moving target in that only the newest cutting edge sim will that "cool" appeal?

And where does the use of Sims fit into curriculum design?  Can it cover some material that would normally be taught face to face freeing up contact time for other kinds of learning as in the inverted classroom?

Since I seem to be reduced to asking questions at this point, I'll ask one more.  There was some discussion about competence compared to conviction that I didn't really understand and I wonder if anyone can explain this a bit or point me to further explanation.

Finally, I have not been able to find a working link to the pdf reading "designing sims the Clark Aldrich Way" anywhere since the link on the week 12 is broken.  Can anyone share a working link?