Emerging Technologies Consulting

I just spent the last hour listening to a presentation I gave with my colleagues, Leslie Madsen-Brooks and Barbara Sawhill. What most amazed me was the conversation that took place between the participants. They had some amazing things to say, good questions and good potential solutions. It makes me really appreciate the crowdsourcing we do for our presentations. Many minds are always better than one or three. I learned a lot, and more importantly, I think the participants learned more than they would have if they’d just heard from the three of us.  Check out the video, and if you have examples, we’d love to hear from you at our wiki. Links appreciated.

YouTube has challenged the tenets of copyright more than any other platform out there.  As people post combinations of music, homemade video, movie and tv clips, and more, copyright holders are trying to lay claim to even the smallest bits of content.  I think most people understood it was wrong to download music for free, but including it with a cat video?  Parody? Fair Use?  Free advertising?  The Social recently reported that the beloved keyboard cat had been inserted into a Hall and Oates video, only to have its music stripped, either through the auto music fingerprinting tool used by YouTube or through a direct request from Warner Music Group.   There’s been much outcry about this action from commenters on the video, many of whom think this is a dumb move for WMG and/or Hall and Oates, who are getting some free publicity and perhaps a new (younger) fan base.

I had music stripped from a video I made for a conference and I disputed it, claiming Fair Use.  I won the dispute and the music was returned.  It’s hard to say whether I was within my rights or not.  I’m not a lawyer.  I claimed that I was using the video for educational purposes, that I was not infringing on their ability to make money off the music, and I wasn’t making money off it either.  On the other hand, I did use at least one entire song, and fair use guidelines do suggest using only a small percentage of a work.  I thought about asking permission, but it’s a hassle and the company often asks for money.

I like the idea of asking permission, but people don’t for fear of hearing no, or of hearing yes, but you’ll need to pay us a thousand bucks.  Perhaps they could make this process easier or have a smaller fee for use–like 25 cents.  Or they can accept just getting credit, a full cite as one might do with academic work, with a link to the song so that someone might buy it.  How much would it cost WMG to buy 375,000 impressions on Google? A lot.  And yet they got it for free–or would, if they let the music stand.

As an academic, I appreciate getting and giving credit where credit is due.  But individuals who are expressing themselves or making a point, using pieces of copyrighted material can’t afford the fees one might charge to a tv, film or advertising producer for the use of a song or a clip of video.  We need more flexibility and we need for companies to recognize when they’re truly losing money and when they’re gaining something.  I think the remix culture will win eventually, but it will be a long battle.

Today collection of tools is of a much higher quality than anything I looked at last week.  I was starting to worry that I wouldn’t be able to find anything worthwhile out there.  But today we have an annotation tool, a huge collection of delicious (social bookmarking) tools, and Academic Earth, the educational video collection.

• A.nnotate is a prouduct that lets you upload documents in many different formats and put “stickies” on them.  Those documents can then be shared with others so that you can collaborate on projects with others.  There are a number of different pricing plans, including one specifically for academic institutions that also includes a way to integrate with Learning Management Systems.  They tout the ability to integrate with Moodle and also say they can integrate with other systems.  This will cost you a fair amount of money–around $3000 for unlimited usage–but it might save you your own server costs in some areas.  They also have a free version for individuals to use that looks like it will suit most peoples needs.  Although both Diigo and Google docs allow for some commenting and collaboration, this product allows multiple formats from pdfs to web pages and the notes are intuitive to make and read.  This definitely looks like a product worth investigating and I’m thinking it would be great for commenting on student work.  I’ve often used the comment feature in various word processors and although that works, there could be compatibility problems and it just feels a little clunky to me.
• Absolutely Delicious is really a web page with a list of links to a wide variety of delicious tools.  I’m a big fan of delicious so it’s nice to see a list of resources that can help me take advantage of that tool better.  There are tools that help you manage, retag, post, and search you bookmarks.  Some are web based and some are desktop tools.  There are also instructions for posting delicious links to your blog and simply how to get started using delicious.  I highly recommend adding *this* site to your bookmarks and try out some of the tools on the site.
• Academic Earth is a site I looked at and wrote a bit about before.  I really do like the look an feel of this site.  It’s uncluttered and very easy to navigate.  I had said earlier that compared to YouTube, the site had less material, but it’s definitely growing, and I think the way it’s organized by subject matter makes a lot of sense.  The YouTube EDU site is organized by school and many of the videos listed under the school are more promotional than educational.  There’s nothing really wrong with that, but if you’re looking for physics lectures, you’ll have to do a search.  Once you click a video, you’re out of the EDU portal and getting back isn’t easy.  While there are 691 videos on YouTube’s EDU site labelled physics compared to AE’s 4, I still think that AE is going to win out–at least it should.  While YouTube fell into being used for education, AE was built for it and there are features that make it a better tool for that reason.  In addition to the listing by topic or subject, there are also playlists organized by editors.  Those playlists include “Understanding the Economic Crisis” and “Wars Throughout History.”  I’m planning to use those with my kids–at least my high schooler–this summer.  There just seems to be more potential for building out an entire learning unit from AE lectures than from YouTube materials.

These are definitely must check out tools.  Let me know what you think of them or how you’re using them!

I managed to look at three social software sites/applications this morning.  As I suspected, some of the sites are just not that useful or are defunct.  Of the sites that I looked at, at least one seems like it would be useful, but not for education.  The other two inspired some ideas for assignments using social media, proving that even not so useful sites can be inspiring.  Here’s the lowdown:

1. The first site I looked at was 1000 Words, a site where users can post pictures along with 1000 word essay about the significance of the picture.  There are some interesting photos there and some of the essays are quite moving.  I read one about the death of a son that was quite poignant.  Nothing has been posted to the site since December of 2008 so I think it’s safe to say it’s essentially defunct, but the idea behind the site is really interesting.  I could definitely imagine an assignment where students are required to take a photograph (or use an older photo) and then write a corresponding essay, create a story around that.  If the site is still around over the years, it would certainly serve as a good model.
2. Next up is 12 Seconds, a video sharing site for videos that are, you guessed it, 12 seconds long.  A perusal of some of the videos, however, leads me to the idea that this is where most of the bad stuff on the Internet goes to die.  12 seconds isn’t a lot of time and unfortunately, most people don’t quite know what to do with that constraint.  Again, constraining students to 12 seconds of video might make an interesting assignment, but please have them do some editing first.
3. Finally, there’s 14 Days, a time-tracking/project management site.  This site looks quite useful for tracking the amount of time spent on a project and by multiple individuals.  There’s even a real-time timer so that as you start working on something, say a section of programming, you can see automatically how much time you’ve spent.  No more guess work!  The project manager can see all time spent on a project by several different people and doesn’t have to manually calculate anything.  The site offers both free and paid versions of the product, depending on the number of projects you need to manage.  It looks like a really slick application, but except at the administrative level, it has very little use in education.

Three down, 1997 to go!

YouTube Edu launched this week, collecting many of the college and university posted lectures and events.  Many colleges and universities have been recording classroom and special lectures and posting them to YouTube for quite a while, and they have also been using iTunes U for this purpose as well.  I wonder, and I’m not the only one, if YouTube Edu will be an iTunes U killer. But I also noticed that many of the videos are not-so-subtle attempts at marketing the college.  Certainly, that’s one of the appeals of doing something like this.  Prospective students Google your school and some YouTube videos come up, they watch and enjoy, and then apply.  But, there’s a lot of good material there.  I’m teaching Watchmen next week and I found a few videos on the science of Watchmen and the Cold War/War on Terrorism commentary it might offer.  Useful stuff for me as a teacher, and probably for students as well.

All the videos for now, come from partner institutions, a fact some complain about, suggesting that YouTube should include video from other sources that are also educational.  While I agree that maybe the definition is too narrow, I know that the material you get if you click on the “education” tag in YouTube or do a broader search for educational material is all over the map in terms of quality.  The same is true for some of the college material–sometimes it’s boring or doesn’t address the topic you thought it would, but at least it’s somewhat easier to find quality information.  Maybe there’s a way to counter this narrow focus on institutional videos.

Others have pointed out the narrow focus on college and university material, leaving out the K-12 sector.  In my meanderings through YouTube, I’ve run into a lot of interesting material that obviously comes from K-12 institutions.  It would be great to collect that all in one place or to otherwise provide a way for younger students to safely post their video work online.

Academic Earth in another site that hosts video lectures, purporting to be the Hulu for eductation.  It has a very limited number of institutions from which it draws material, but the material is all very good, and it’s pretty easy to find things by browsing through their directory, but there’s definitely less material there.

I like the idea of having some lectures and interviews and general visual material available online.  Certainly I’ve used many of those materials myself, but I worry about the proliferation of just lecture recordings as opposed to more focused material.  It seems that the lecture material is better consumed within a larger context, along with a course or at least a collection of readings. I know some of these videos are part of OCW courses, but that’s not always clear from the stand-alone videos. If these are going to be a way of providing informal learning for people, I think it would be nice to link to other resources, to build more of a learning environment around the videos.  This isn’t happening on YouTube, Academic Earth, or iTunes right now.  You get related videos, based on keywords, but not much else.  These could be much richer resources, and maybe that means not relying on Google/YouTube to do all the contextualizing.

Related articles by Zemanta

• YouTube EDU Launches, So Go Learn Something (techcrunch.com)
• YouTube EDU Brings Free Education to the Masses [Learning] (lifehacker.com)
• YouTube Edu Launches (blogs.wsj.com)
• Academic Earth Is The Hulu For Education (techcrunch.com)

On Wednesday, I’ll be conducting a day-long workshop at Gettysburg College through NITLE’s wonderful programming.  In preparation for the workshop, I prepared the following resources.  There’s so much out there now on using different social software tools for teaching that it’s hard to keep the list short.  I just threw a few things in each category.  If you know of other resources I should include, let me know.

General–interesting things on Social Software in Education

• Michael Wesch from Academic Commons, Learning in New Media Environments (The whole issue is worth exploring)
• Clay Shirky on Tagging
• Mark Prensky (classic writing on digital natives, gaming, education, etc.)

Blogs

• Academic Blog Wiki
• Research Blogging
• Blog Software

Wiki Assignments

• Writing/Evaluation Assignment
• Wikipedia’s invitation to participate and ideas for assignments
• Wikiversity
• Educause: 7 Things You Should Know about Wikis
• Wikis in Plain English (video)

Social Bookmarking

• List of articles/resources on using social bookmarking

Images

• The Commons at Flickr
• FlickrVision

Social Networking

• Social Networking for Educators
• 25 Apps for Facebook for Educations

Gaming

• SLED
• Second Life vs. WoW for learning
• Language Learning in WoW