We heard from Kyle Courtney yesterday (Oct 22, 2014) about “Fair Use and Copyright in the Digital Era”. Kyle is a terrific and engaging speaker. I had spoken to him earlier when I had questions regarding the use of copyrighted material in MOOCs.
Bottom line – there are no simple answers and use your discretion in interpreting a complex set of laws based on your risk tolerance. As we have seen in the Georgia State University e-reserves case (Cambridge University Press et al v Patton et al), even the courts can’t seem to decide one way or the other! For all the resources related to this case, click here.
The core issue is that faculty rely on content created by many others for their teaching. The content comes from a variety of sources and from all over the world. Copyright laws provide the general framework for the appropriate use of the content, however, there are considerable variations from one country to the other. Copyright protection is in effect the moment content is created and stays with the author. Duration of the copyright is pretty complex subject matter and you can read more about it here. When an author publishes content, generally, they transfer the copyright to the publisher. This results in enormous inconveniences for the use of published work including the fact that for certain uses of the published work, the original author himself/herself need to seek publisher’s permission. Open access policy is beginning to address this issue somewhat in case of scholarly articles. According to this, the author exercises his/her rights to the content in addition to granting rights to the publisher.
As always, technology is ahead of policies and this issue is not an exception. The explosion in born digital content and the use of digital materials in teaching, learning and research has brought to light the lack of clarity of current copyright laws which are still catching up.
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Taken from: http://www.wellesley.edu/news/2014/10/node/49591%5B/caption%5D
October is “National Cybersecurity Awareness Month” (NCSAM). For details regarding what LTS has planned for this, please refer to the Daily Shot article here. There are several events and informational messages that being prepared to increase awareness amongst our users. I strongly encourage you to take advantage of as many of these as possible. I would like to highlight the featured event which is being co-sponsored by Babson, Olin and Wellesley Colleges. Here is the description from the Daily Shot article:
“The featured event is a BOW-sponsored presentation and book signing by John Sileo, an award-winning author, trusted advisor, and leading speaker on successfully managing privacy and reputation exposure. He is CEO of The Sileo Group, which advises clients like 60 Minutes, Blue Cross, the FDIC, Homeland Security, the Pentagon, Pfizer, USA Today, and organizations of all sizes on defending privacy, profits, and reputation. His presentation, “Data Spies, Human Hackers & Internet Attackers: Bulletproof Your Privacy & Profits,” highlights current data privacy trends as well as practical, tactical solutions.
His talk will be held on Friday, October 24 from 10 to 11 a.m. at Babson College in the Olin Hall Auditorium, with a book sale and signing immediately following the presentation. Food and beverage will be provided. Transportation from Wellesley to Babson will also be available; shuttle vans will leave the Campus Center beginning at 9:30 a.m., and will return following the presentation at 11, and then again at11:30 for those wishing to stay for the book signing. RSVP: please click here. This event is open to all faculty, staff, and students.”
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After a brief visit to Scripps College , I headed to Orlando to attend the EDUCAUSE annual conference. It was well attended as evidenced by long lines during lunch times. I have never seen such lines before. If you are interested in my tweets during the conference, you can check them out here. If you want to see all tweets with the hashtag #edu14, click here. Though the latter one is long, it is worth reading through some of them or by further filtering based on your interest. I was too tired to tweet after a while because the sessions I went to did not have much for me to tweet and the others were doing a better job.
I always look forward to general sessions at EDUCAUSE. This year the first one was by Clayton Christensen on Disruptive Innovation. The entire talk will be available to the public in 90 days here, unless you have a valid EDUCAUSE account, in which case you should be able to listen now. Since I have heard Christensen a few times before, there was not much here for me. Also, he has had recent health issues, and it showed. He himself mentioned his recent stroke, when he was unable to recall a word during the talk. He mentioned how Higher Ed is in a crisis and unless it is disrupted in some serious fashion, the consequences can be dire. Obviously, recent technologies have already disrupted Higher Ed, but the basic methods of teaching, learning and research have not changed and the indirect message that everyone heard is that we, as technologists, can make a difference here. Perhaps! Also, I was not fond of some of the analogies he presented because they may work for corporate America, but not necessarily in Higher Ed. On the other hand, may be that is the disruption that he was referring to.
Chsitensen was also arguing for more open, modular and interoperable “things” in general. We all, especially me, support this wholeheartedly. However, there was a problem. The slide where this appeared, was copyrighted by him!
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