Fair Use Stays Fair

Just a quick post, in case you haven't heard, regarding the litigation brought by Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and Sage Publications -- with backing from the publishing industry (shame on them all) -- against Georgia State University and their e-reserves. The federal courts rejected 94 of the 99 instances cited by the publishers as copyright violations and basically told them to go take a hike.
Fair Use in academics is just that, and the money being made by specialized scholarly and textbook publishers fighting Fair Use in the digital age is scandalous. So when instructors hold the line, honor Fair Use, find and make scholarly material for their courses available? It's great that GSU backs them up, goes to court, and wins.
Another good day for the good guys. Read more at Inside Higher Ed. 

Drawing the line on eBooks

Publishers refusing to sell eBooks to public libraries? Really? Granted publishers are now in the same pickle as medicine, much of the industrial sector, and even higher education. Times change, technology accelerates that change. You don't want to change, but you have to change. 


Publishers love eBooks when it means a new, increasing readership. But they want it all, don't want to seriously imagine their own change, and are getting especially greedy where public libraries and those who NEED our libraries are concerned. 


Most Americans can now buy a Kindle for as little as $79 and easily access the public library eBooks, free Google and public domain books, massive online help downloads, etc available via this new technology. eBooks offer unprecedented value to the home-bound, to busy workers, to those with limited transportation, to those working odd hours, or just someone looking for a just-in-time read when they finish their last book. Our libraries are moving rapidly to understand this affordance and leverage it for the public good. 


And the publishers? They want it all, as much as they can shove into their pockets, and are beginning to deny public libraries the right to lend e-Books. I wish I knew what to recommend to stop them. Don't buy their books? I can't do that, can't say that, can't go there. Cut out the public library middlemen and steal e-books? I can't say that either. I love writers and they are caught in the cross-fire. But, here's what Salley Shannon, the president of the American Society of Journalists and Authors has to say: 

"Denying public libraries eBooks is so mean-spirited, so unreasonable, so against the grain of American tradition, that it will surely backfire if anywhere near a majority of publishers do it. Stealing eBooks will become a laudable way to fight back, done with no pang of conscience whatever."


Yikes! Here's her full letter. 


When writers believe stealing books will become a laudable act, we know the system is broken. And who has the tools to fix it?  There's no Amazon, Apple or Google to enforce muscle in keeping a bridge across the digital divide the way they have with music and personally-owned e-literature (Apple: .99 cents or we shut iTunes down; Amazon: control the cost or you don't Kindle-book here; Google: digitizing the literary public domain for all and fight in court anyone who tries to stop them.)


I do understand how frightening it is to see your industry change. As we move from an industrial to a digital age, we are all - everyone - facing challenges and fears. But the trend of turning on backs on people of need to keep our own customs and habits? Too many (medicine, higher education, industry going off-shore) have taken that path and it's time to back up, and go down a new road. Publishers, back up. Right your path or you will be creating a rebel nation of book thieves. Consider yourself warned. 

Painting on a Brand New Canvas

University of Washington chooses its next generation learning managment system!

Well, the contract hasn't yet been signed and details on production-level-services still to come, but the news is out that the University of Washington will soon have a true, centrally supported LMS:  Canvas by Instructure.


Hurrah! Huzzah! Yippee.
Yes, it's been such a long time that most programs in Seattle have something under the IT guy's desk (Moodle, Blackboard, Sakai...) and the Tacoma and Bothell campuses both support Blackboard, but it's anticipated that most of these will fade and expire as UW puts great resources into support of Canvas as its enterprise LMS.

No more home-grown cacophony of tools! Course auto-enrollment! Smooth final  grade transfer!  Single-source UW NetID authentication!  Just these administrative functions will make our lives easier.

But that's not why we're finally moving forward on a central LMS. Sometimes you do something because it's the right thing to do. Thoughtfully choosing the best possible LMS for UW teaching and learning was the right thing to do.  Canvas was chosen over a number of possible vendors and the two quarter pilot project found this open environment to be a stable, accessible, innovative platform with rich, context-embedded help files and social tools for learner and instructor. Hooray!

But it's still just a set of tools and now the challenge is to invent rich, technolog-infused learning - anytime, anywhere, anyone - from those tools.

Thus, the hard work begins: thinking about teaching and learning in a digital, social, internet-defined age. It will take awhile for UW to get Canvas set up here (Fall? Fingers crossed), but if you want to learn more now, the Canvas help files we linked to for the UW pilot are live. I'm guessing the page will stay around until we have a production site. Meanwhile, some deep discussions will be taking place in the Faculty Resource Center regarding using Canvas features and tools - embedded and embeddable - to create deeper, more meaningful learning.

Explore. Have fun. Get ready to be amazed.

Everything that rises must converge

Spring is in the air at the University of Washington, Tacoma! Today, as we cross our fingers that March will continue to gambol out like a lamb, we find our spirits lifting. The sun is out and lovely flowers have begun to bloom in unexpected places. Today is also the first day of Spring quarter, and once again we sharpen our digital pencils, open new smelly markers and
"...Ladies and Gentlemen, start your engines!" 

In this spirit, let's talk about hope, change, innovation, transformation, and the kitchen sink. Let us rise and converge!

CreativeCommons flickr photo from farhadfarhad

Last week, I attended a two-day, three-campus retreat on Redefining Higher Education. It was the learning-focused continuation of a larger, week-long Innovation Forum put on by UW Bothell, a campus 20-some miles to the north. Redefining higher education? Really? Embracing creativity, change, and innovation in higher education teaching and learning? Really?  Seems almost a string of gibberish oxymorons, no? 

This beautiful, ancient, unchanging, hegemonic institution redefined? The horror! Banish the thought! If it worked for our nation's richest and most powerful forefathers - then dagnabit - it should work for their off-spring today. And here's the thing: it does. Harvard graduates 97% of its undergrads in 4 years. UW Seattle, rejecting more than half of its applicants, graduates 75% within six years. (That's a great figure, by the way. Other HE institutions in Washington are closer to 50% and Washington rocks compared to other states.)


Children of the rich, powerful, and well-educated do well in college. Others often rise and converge in a mess of debt, sorrow, boredom and rage. And these latter learners, the new majority in most HE institutions, are the learners that UWB wanted us to think about in our two-day Spring break retreat. These are the students of Bothell and Tacoma. These are the 25% who drop out at UW Seattle or the 50% that Seattle turned away. The majority of students now pounding on our walls for access previously reserved for the few, the privileged, those not destined to be marines.
What would it take to create an engaging, deeper learning experience for the new learner? What would it take to move a ship larger than the Titanic (and in as much danger) toward more innovative blue ocean waters?

"SKUNK WORKS?" one aged administrator replied. Those who have been around awhile know that the institution will attempt to kill innovation (and the innovators) every step of the way. It's the inherent biology of large organisms: the larger the organization, the stronger the need for self-preservation as is and the more resistant to change. (Hence Christensen's notion that disruptive innovation must come from the outside; hence participants of the retreat agreeing one must start small and be silent/serpentine/sly; hence most agreeing that Bothell and Tacoma had better chances for success.) 

 So, if I were to sum up two intense days of deep conversation on saving our ship...or at least saving the passengers for whom there are no row boats:

• Believe. Change happens when people within the organization believe it is possible. 
• Take lots of small chances. The military floats change through support for quiet, pilot projects. If it works, there's better chance of wide-spread adoption.
• Keep your eye on the prize: students who have the skills to be successful in the workforce, in civic affairs, in their own lives.
• Diversify, select, amplify. Back to the metaphor of the organism: this, claimed one participant, is how we survive. Time to diversify.
• Be fearless. If you do it right, you will fail. Often. Cultivate failure (the right kinds), cultivate collaborators, cultivate a small, vibrant culture of the imagination. 

And that's how we will redefine higher education. One step at a time, one risk at a time, one online program, one adventurous course, one implementation of analytic awareness, one embrace of Khan Academy or Livemocha or Persistence Plus or Google Scholar - Google Apps - Google Sites - Google Whatever. Embrace Wikipedia (the disdain for this wonderful democratization of knowledge by HE would astound outsiders) and flickr's visual ways of knowing and ANY crowd-sourcing and collaboration tool used in the creation of knowledge. Just do it, the folks at Nike say. Do it before "the beards" (as they're called here at UWT) know that you did it. Just get it done.
Joyous Spring! Here's to hope and rebirth and wonder.

Pi Day! Einstein's birthday! Joy and gratitude for math

...and let's not forget gratitude for math teachers.

And for the anonymous cartoonist whose backward-thinking graphic went viral this year. Thank you interwebs and tubes and collective shared learning. Thank you for geeky math humor. Oh beautiful world that makes sense, thank you for Pi.

OK, let's stop eating our 3.14 pieces of strawberry rhubarb (to infinity!) and talk about math...in America. We're slipping. Evidence is everywhere that we are not competing on the international stage and that many students that struggle with math courses in middle school later drop out. What's happening when in China and India high school students traditionally take calculus and in the US, that course is reserved for 13% of our high school population? Math education is so poor right now that here at University of Washington Tacoma, more that 50% of our entering students don't even test successfully into college-level math courses. They are sent away, to community college, with fingers crossed they do the work and eventually return.

Some say the sports and organized extracurricular-activities we pressure our students into here in the US distracts them from study. Some say the answers are to water down the curriculum for US students so as not to damage their self-esteem or interrupt their after school party time.

Biology, chem, physics? Same story. High school requirements here are a shallow one year. In India and China? They study these subjects EVERY year. My humble opinion is that we demand more science, less modern dance. No wonder our young athletes, Glee-kids, and martial artists  do so poorly in college. They hardly studied in high school. Or middle school.

Some make the case that our well-rounded and "everyone is perfectly the best" educational approach defines more creative, innovative, entrepreneurial souls and this will be America's edge. Resume for the new millenium: stupid but creative; lazy but not a follower; no quantitative skills but great amateur jump shot.

Some make the case that in a technology age, let technology do what parents and teachers can't: keep the kids in their seats engaged in learning math. Bless you Sal Khan for attempting to do just that. Let's celebrate Pi Day by thinking deeply about how to act on evidence that some learners will stop, think, learn math if we give them the right tools.

Now, let's move Khan Academy into the high schools and colleges and graduate the next generation of scientists, mathematicians and glorious, geek-humor loving nerds. Happy Pi Day!

Times they are a-changin': Horizon Retreat

No organization maps the changes in these crazy times more thoughtfully than the New Media Consortium, authors of the Annual Horizon Report on emerging technologies in education. I do believe Horizon Report 2012 is due to be released in the next few weeks, at the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (look for me there!) but if you can't wait, take a look instead at what NMC was up to last week.

http://www.nmc.org/news/download-communique-horizon-project-retreat

One hundred thought leaders from across higher education, museums and industry gathered together to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Horizon Report by thinking deeply for three days (ouch!) about the future of higher education, and how technology might bring us closer to a vision that is:

• global, 
• open, 
• mobile, 
• based in the cloud, and 
• creates new kinds of literacy (digital, visual, collaborative) 

Here's the summary, with a nice, short pdf report on meta-trends ahead for higher education. They call the summary report a communique, with accent aigu and all the global trimmings. (It made me feel so fancy to download it. Not just a white paper, but a Francais white paper!)

It has much that is "Sky is blue, babies need milk" for those of us who have been saying same for years, but it's well said and will hopefully be the foundation for a number of rich conversations at ELI in a few weeks.

If you're there, come to my talk with McGee and Morgan on the "Upside-Down Learning Model." I promise to talk about the communique in my best Parisien accent.

Social Media in (a small part of) the Academy

Speaking to a colleague recently, she mentioned how technology at her Research 1 institution is changing the classroom. Not technology in FRONT of the class, nor technology acknowledged FROM the front of the class, but technology in the back (and middle) rows. Students who don't understand the professor are now putting in their ear phones and Googling the topic, looking for someone or some text that can explain what the instructor does not. They're setting up chat circles and exchanging information and explanations. They're seizing the knowledge in what my friend describes as a reshaping of the "authority of knowledge." When did this happen?
Instructors in smaller courses are retaliating. Ages ago we banned cell phones and texting, but now some are adding laptops to the banned list. No smart phones, no tablets, no laptops. "No knowledge for thee that is not from me." When did this happen?
I can't start my old rant regarding how change will happen with or without us. How society is asking for us to change: students with their ear plugs, parents with their rage, government with their cutbacks in funding, and society with its call for accountability. I can't go there. It makes me too sad. Instead of thumping that drum (again) I'll lead you down a more optimistic road: social media in our own research and scholarship. A significant body of the academy is discovering what their students have long been calling from the back rows: technology is rocking the academy. In a very good way.
But don't believe me. Check out this digital e-resource on the topic:

The (Coming) Social Media Revolution in the Academy