Tuesday, December 2, 2008
A new group for Tech
The powers that be have determined that teachers at our school should use technology. The light shines a little. I have been so negative about our tech that I did not respond to his plea for committtee members right away. Ah well we shall see what this group holds. I have joined for now.
Friday, October 10, 2008
Copyright Connundrum
Copyright has taken a beating since the birth of the internet. The music industry seems to have started the call for more regulation as well as more punishment for copyright infringment. Soon after the movie studios bgan their campaign to stop copying. The industry that doesn't get as much press is commercial artists. Their images have been readily copied for all kinds of uses. Finding usable images on the internet was easy a few years ago. Now you can find the images but many of them have been protected now.
As far as copying an original and using it make money this is nothing new. Artists have been doing this for quite a while. I think this has become more of an issue because companies, not artists are seeing their property being used. Technology comes into the picture because it allows this copying of material. Copying could be done before computers, with cameras or tape recording for example. Before computers this copying was more labor intensive and the quality was not the same. In most cases you could tell it was not the original. With computers the copying is very easy and not labor intensive. The quality of the copies is much much better.
Parodies are still another art form that has been around for hundreds of years. Borrowing a song to make a different song with different lyrics. The United States did that when we sing the Anthem before a baseball game. The song for the Anthem was an English tune before we made it ours.
I enjoyed the piece written by the copyright lawyer. He had great insight into the many pitfalls surrounding the rules of copyright. Some of the statutes seem to have been added as a special exception added to aid or protect a particular interested party. The writer was right to liken copyright to tax laws. They have been twisted to suit one industry or another. I do like this quote about the law.
“I hate that creativity is metered and parceled to its last ounce of profit. I hate that our technology is hobbled beyond its paper and other analog counterparts so that it permits us to view but not print, listen but not share, read once but not lend, consume but not create. But I can hate this situation without believing that the idea of copyright is fundamentally flawed.”
About creatively assembled material ‘borrowed from other sources’, I think there has to be some limits. For some copyrighted material I think there has to be a limit on how long it can be protected. I like the idea of Jonathan Zittrain’s where copyright will not be renewed unless you re-register it every so many years. This idea may even benefit artists who entered into bad deals with record companies, or with bands that split their royalties. They are forced to re-evaluate the value of their work.
As to artists who work on the edge of copyright i.e. mash-ups or sampling they should be allowed to create their work and even earn money from it but it must have a threshold of income. I think maybe it could be a situation of ask forgiveness but not necessarily permission. If an artist is going to make something from a conglomeration of media, he or she may not know how it is going to come out before they start. I would hate to see projects not undertaken for fear that if the creation is made they will be taken to the court.
I like the idea of a limited use of copyright materials. My library has a electronic library that loans out electronic media that has a time limit. After 3 weeks the media becomes unusable. Maybe this sort of ‘grace period’ could be extended to the mash-up artists as well.
Educators do not understand fair use. I don’t think I fully understand it. I also worry that educators will avoid issues of copyright by not even trying projects. For this case I think the same kind of grace period should be extended. Maybe part of rubrics should include, does this violate copyright?
Enforcement for violations will probably become easier in the future. Some company will no doubt develop a search engine to seek out metadata hidden in electronic files in order to find violators. It would be good for users to have a set of standards to adhere to that both sides of an issue can live with.
As far as copying an original and using it make money this is nothing new. Artists have been doing this for quite a while. I think this has become more of an issue because companies, not artists are seeing their property being used. Technology comes into the picture because it allows this copying of material. Copying could be done before computers, with cameras or tape recording for example. Before computers this copying was more labor intensive and the quality was not the same. In most cases you could tell it was not the original. With computers the copying is very easy and not labor intensive. The quality of the copies is much much better.
Parodies are still another art form that has been around for hundreds of years. Borrowing a song to make a different song with different lyrics. The United States did that when we sing the Anthem before a baseball game. The song for the Anthem was an English tune before we made it ours.
I enjoyed the piece written by the copyright lawyer. He had great insight into the many pitfalls surrounding the rules of copyright. Some of the statutes seem to have been added as a special exception added to aid or protect a particular interested party. The writer was right to liken copyright to tax laws. They have been twisted to suit one industry or another. I do like this quote about the law.
“I hate that creativity is metered and parceled to its last ounce of profit. I hate that our technology is hobbled beyond its paper and other analog counterparts so that it permits us to view but not print, listen but not share, read once but not lend, consume but not create. But I can hate this situation without believing that the idea of copyright is fundamentally flawed.”
About creatively assembled material ‘borrowed from other sources’, I think there has to be some limits. For some copyrighted material I think there has to be a limit on how long it can be protected. I like the idea of Jonathan Zittrain’s where copyright will not be renewed unless you re-register it every so many years. This idea may even benefit artists who entered into bad deals with record companies, or with bands that split their royalties. They are forced to re-evaluate the value of their work.
As to artists who work on the edge of copyright i.e. mash-ups or sampling they should be allowed to create their work and even earn money from it but it must have a threshold of income. I think maybe it could be a situation of ask forgiveness but not necessarily permission. If an artist is going to make something from a conglomeration of media, he or she may not know how it is going to come out before they start. I would hate to see projects not undertaken for fear that if the creation is made they will be taken to the court.
I like the idea of a limited use of copyright materials. My library has a electronic library that loans out electronic media that has a time limit. After 3 weeks the media becomes unusable. Maybe this sort of ‘grace period’ could be extended to the mash-up artists as well.
Educators do not understand fair use. I don’t think I fully understand it. I also worry that educators will avoid issues of copyright by not even trying projects. For this case I think the same kind of grace period should be extended. Maybe part of rubrics should include, does this violate copyright?
Enforcement for violations will probably become easier in the future. Some company will no doubt develop a search engine to seek out metadata hidden in electronic files in order to find violators. It would be good for users to have a set of standards to adhere to that both sides of an issue can live with.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
How are school stacks up
I have just completed the review of technology for our district. I did have some trouble determining a few things. I was not sure of budgetary item that appeared on the survey. I am not sure of my districts funding of professional growth. I don't know if it is a line item in the tech budget or not. I also did not know about tech materials. The question asked if tech purchases were separate or part of the textbook funds. Again I am not sure where some of the money comes from. In the past when we have adopted new text books we have been getting any accompanying software. Those item definitely came from a textbook budget.
Our professional development is not done very well.
We lack Vision at our school. The people in charge are becoming less able to focus on tech issues. In the past (I will use this phrase a lot because I have been at my school for sooo long.) we met as a group of tech people. We knew what plans were coming down the pike. We had input into whether we thought a certain form of technology would be used. In the past 3 years I have seen my tech coordinator bow to people of the community, the school board and the superintendent. He is at wits end. He also believes his job "is on the line" at every decision. He has only be lackluster in his defense of tech.
We used to meet at a tech group then our meeting became co-opted into a curiculum committee. This technology and curriculum committee met and talked about curriculum mostly. I found out after it had started that we had a few school board members with agendas. They want to impose their own forms of curriculum. One wanted gifted programs for science brought into our school. We are a small district and we cannot offer advanced classes for every discipline. She still carried on, unsurprisingly she had 2 students in the district at the very grade level she wanted the advanced classes. The other member wants us to get our tech cheap. He can't understand why tech purchases cost so much. He always wanted us to negociate the price we would pay. We were and still are a small school district at the time our money was as good as anyone elses. He also had some old tech that he thought the school could use. He gave us 10 year old servers and 6 year old laptops with no OS, and not enough power cords. The committee is as far as I know disbanded.
We had a committee that worked and it became so changed that it no longer worked.
Our professional development is not done very well.
We lack Vision at our school. The people in charge are becoming less able to focus on tech issues. In the past (I will use this phrase a lot because I have been at my school for sooo long.) we met as a group of tech people. We knew what plans were coming down the pike. We had input into whether we thought a certain form of technology would be used. In the past 3 years I have seen my tech coordinator bow to people of the community, the school board and the superintendent. He is at wits end. He also believes his job "is on the line" at every decision. He has only be lackluster in his defense of tech.
We used to meet at a tech group then our meeting became co-opted into a curiculum committee. This technology and curriculum committee met and talked about curriculum mostly. I found out after it had started that we had a few school board members with agendas. They want to impose their own forms of curriculum. One wanted gifted programs for science brought into our school. We are a small district and we cannot offer advanced classes for every discipline. She still carried on, unsurprisingly she had 2 students in the district at the very grade level she wanted the advanced classes. The other member wants us to get our tech cheap. He can't understand why tech purchases cost so much. He always wanted us to negociate the price we would pay. We were and still are a small school district at the time our money was as good as anyone elses. He also had some old tech that he thought the school could use. He gave us 10 year old servers and 6 year old laptops with no OS, and not enough power cords. The committee is as far as I know disbanded.
We had a committee that worked and it became so changed that it no longer worked.
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