Serendipity35

Classroom google.com/edu/classroom is a new, free tool in the Google Apps for Education suite. It helps teachers create and organize assignments, provide feedback and communicate with their classes.

I have had the feeling for at least a year that Google is planning to move in a much bigger way into education, especially higher education.

This new tool lets teachers create assignments, share a single document or automatically make a copy for each student. You can see who has or hasn't completed the work and provide direct feedback. Of course, it is tied into all the other Google Apps. For example, it automatically creates Drive folders for each assignment and for each student. Students can see what’s due on their Assignments page.

Currently, it is available for teachers at all levels, but you need to apply for a preview of Classroom. I did awhile back, but no preview yet. Classroom will be available to any school using Google Apps for Education by September.

I still think that the real online Google Classroom is yet to come. We will be hosting our online courses in a free Google LMS one day. Look out Blackboard, Canvas and all the rest.

More sources on learning about fair use and copyright  - collected by Bernard Bull.

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1. Understanding Fair Use in the Digital World – When we start to teach about copyright, we can approach it by starting with what we can do or what we cant’ do. I happen to be a fan of starting with what we can do by teaching “fair use.” This is a good introduction to the topic.

2.Teaching Copyright – This site includes 5 60-minute lesson to teach about copyright and fair use. It is accurate, well designed, and ready to use with students.

3. YouTube Copyright School – Do you want to teach copyright through high-interest video and some checks for understanding? if so, this might be a good option for you.

4. Fair Use Tool – Use this tool to determine whether your usage scenario is fair use.

5. Copyright Web Site – If you are looking for copyright case studies and examples to use with your students, this is an excellent resource.

6. PBS Learning Media Copyright Lessons – This site has series of ready-made, high-interest lessons on copyright and fair use, designed and labeled for different ages.

7. A Fairy Use Tale – No lesson in fair use is complete without this video - funny, clever and a bit frightening tale of copyright in a Disney world.

8. Flickr – The Commons and The Library of Congress American Memory – If we are going to teach about copyright, why not include finding some great sources, like these two sites, for accessing public domain resources?

9. Find Creative Commons Resources - This is a great search engine for finding resources that you can “use, share and remix.”

10 Fair Use Letter Generator – Part of teaching copyright and fair use is learning how to request and gain the rights to use something. This page is one option.

This month I attended a talk at William Paterson University on fair use for educators given by Brandon Butler. He is the Practitioner-in-Residence at the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Clinic at the Washington College of Law at American University in Washington, D.C. Before teaching law, he was the Director of Public Policy Initiatives at the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). Before that, he was an associate in the Media and Information Technologies practice group at the Washington, D.C. law firm Dow Lohnes PLLC.

One of his main points was that educators need to use fair use and even push against the edges of it. In my years working in instructional design, I had many instances of faculty declaring something to be "fair use" for a new online course section because "that's what I do in my face-to-face class." Of course, that is often not the case.

But one takeaway from the talk was that educators need to use and push at fair use to keep it alive.

I brought up a MOOC I am currently in offered by Coursera and the University of Rochester on "The Music of The Beatles." I'm sure The Beatles have good lawyers, but the idea that there is NO music in the course - not even snippets to illustrate lessons - seems rather sad - and overly cautious.

In 1994, the Supreme Court ruled that parody can be protected by the fair-use clause of the Copyright Act of 1976. The ruling came about when the rap group 2 Live Crew used elements from "Oh Pretty Woman" by Roy Orbison in their song "Pretty Woman." The 2 Live Crew version uses the same guitar riffs and melody, but the lyrics and storyline has the "pretty woman" as a hairy, bald-headed two-timing woman.

The music publishing company that owns Orbison's song sued Luther Campbell of 2 Live Crew for copyright violation saying he used too much of the original work and gained commercially from it. Campbell argued that he had fair use and the Supreme Court agreed. Supreme Court Justice David Souter wrote, "Like less ostensibly humorous forms of criticism, [parody] can provide social benefit by shedding light on an earlier work and, in the process, creating a new one."

The revamped Google search tool (illustrated above) allows you to search based on reuse rights. The photo-sharing site Flickr allows for search of the photos that a particular kind of Creative Commons license.

The Flickr Creative Commons license has several permutations which are designed to provide a creator with more flexibility than copyright provides without requiring the creator to give up copyright. It is very helpful for people looking to “remix” materials originally created by someone else and then shared online with a license that allows remixing.

Images are only one sort of digital content available online with Creative Commons licenses. They are used for audio, video, text documents, slide presentations - and this blog.

The Search.CreativeCommons.org site is not exactly a search engine but metasearch using other search engines and filtering for CC-licensed material. The search results should be only materials licensed for those particular needs. (You should double check just to be sure.)

At DiscoverEd.CreativeCommons.org site is an experimental project from ccLearn which attempts to provide scalable search and discovery for educational resources on the web. This search prototype hopefully will allow you to explore metadata enhanced search, specifically for OER. Unlike most search engines, it can incorporate data provided by the resource publisher or curator.

Some more sources of information:

Open Access and creative common sense - a 2004 interview with Lawrence Lessig from Open Access Now

A Call For Copyright Rebellion by Steve Kolowish – InsideHigherEd

Free Culture and Remix, by Lawrence Lessig - two books available for purchase, or for free PDF download under a Creative Commons license.

Butler's talk is available online through NJVid and allows you to embed it. It also carries the following Rights Declaration: This video is protected by copyright. You are free to view it but not download or remix it. Please contact the licensing institution for further information about how you may use this video.

 

I use SlideShare to share my slide presentations with the world. They send me weekly stats and they always surprise me.

This last week, the most viewed was one on "Moodle: a free learning management system" which has had 47,000 views. I feel a bit embarrassed by that because the presentation is kind of out of date by now. I think I should do an update. Obviously, there is interest.

The latest popular download of the week was one I did on "Student Blogs As Reflective Practice."

My SlideShare stats showed that 1,000 people have embedded one of my slide presentations on their blog or site. Some can be embedded as a slideshow but some are pdf documents and 2000 times people have downloaded the presentation. That is way more people than I will ever stand in front of live and share a presentation.

I started using Slideshare seven years ago when I posted a set of slides with quotations that I was using in a teacher workshop. I wanted to make them available to the teachers later, so I posted them and told them they could download the PowerPoint and then edit or use it in any way. It was an easy way to open source the idea. (You can add a Creative Commons license to your uploaded work. I generally use the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.)  That set of "Thirty Quotations" has had more than 18,000 views. A few people who downloaded it have even emailed me to let me know how they used them in their classes. I uploaded a "Thirty Quotations Volume 2" the following year.

The really surprising stat that Slideshare emailed me this month was this: 5 Titanics worth of people have viewed those slides. That's one way to think of big data - though I might prefer to think of my readers as being on a Caribbean cruise ship rather than a doomed ocean liner.