Tag Archives: copyleft

The Curse of Knowledge

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Last October, I spoke to a group of PhD and Masters level students on new and emerging collaborative methods of research (e.g., social software tools) in education. I have done the spiel many times before, and I know that not everyone gets it (or cares to get it for that matter). This time, I approached the session differently. I slowed down, and I limited the many possibilities to just a few, manageable choices. After the session, a colleague, who has seen this same presentation several times, commented to me that it was the best way in which I had ever approached the topic and he had the sense that the majority of students were really excited about the possibilities.

Simple Remote Control

Today’s NYT Article Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike helped consolidate some of the thoughts I’ve had since then.

Andrew S. Grove, the co-founder of Intel, put it well in 2005 when he told an interviewer from Fortune, “When everybody knows that something is so, it means that nobody knows nothin’.” In other words, it becomes nearly impossible to look beyond what you know and think outside the box you’ve built around yourself.

The above concept may sound simple, but I can not assume so. A lot of what I teach sounds simple to me, but I must be deliberate here to say that many of the ideas we find simple are in fact not simple, in both the conceptual understanding and actualization of these concepts. If they were that simple, I would be out of a job. And unless we understand how our ideas sound to others, we may actually be causing more harm than good in creating the changes in schools, pedagogy and practice we seek. Consider the following as it may relate to your educational context.

This so-called curse of knowledge, a phrase used in a 1989 paper in The Journal of Political Economy, means that once you’ve become an expert in a particular subject, it’s hard to imagine not knowing what you do. Your conversations with others in the field are peppered with catch phrases and jargon that are foreign to the uninitiated. When it’s time to accomplish a task — open a store, build a house, buy new cash registers, sell insurance — those in the know get it done the way it has always been done, stifling innovation as they barrel along the well-worn path.

Other related ideas can be found in The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz. The book is a few years old, but the ideas are relevant. If you haven’t watched Schwartz’s TED Talk, do so.

The Paradox of Choice is a popularization of components of decision-theory. The underlying thesis reflects the paradox “that more choices may lead to a poorer decision or a failure to make a decision at all.” Schwartz argues that with so many options to choose from, people find it difficult to choose at all. This paradox produces paralysis rather than liberation.

So what does this all mean in our world of Web 2.0 tools, where there are dozens of ways to blog, wiki, podcasts and screencast?. Does this influence how we facilitate our courses or our professional development opportunities? What does this mean for our own personal practice?

I know I have to think about this more. Help me. What are your thoughts?

Threats Against User-Generated Content

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Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails recently posted his thoughts on his plan for a user-generated content site where fans would be encouraged to remix and mash-up NIN content. Due to a lawsuit by Universal Studios (NIN music copyright holder) against Youtube and MySpace, the plans for this site have been cancelled.

On Saturday morning I became aware of a legal hitch in our plans. My former record company and current owner of all these master files, Universal, is currently involved in a lawsuit with other media titans Google (YouTube) and News Corp (MySpace). Universal is contending that these sites do not have what is referred to as “safe harbor” under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and therefore are in copyright violation because users have uploaded music and video content that is owned by Universal. Universal feels that if they host our remix site, they will be opening themselves up to the accusation that they are sponsoring the same technical violation of copyright they are suing these companies for. Their premise is that if any fan decides to remix one of my masters with material Universal doesn’t own – a “mash-up”, a sample, whatever – and upload it to the site, there is no safe harbor under the DMCA (according to Universal) and they will be doing exactly what MySpace and YouTube are doing. This behavior may get hauled out in court and impact their lawsuit. Because of this they no longer will host our remix site, and are insisting that Nine Inch Nails host it. In exchange for this they will continue to let me upload my Universal masters and make them available to fans, BUT shift the liability of hosting them to me. Part of the arrangement is having user licenses that the fans sign (not unlike those on MySpace or You Tube) saying they will not use unauthorized materials. If they WERE to do such a thing, everybody sues everybody and the world abruptly ends.

Reznor then points to an article at Ars Technica describing a similar suit between Viacom and Youtube. This excerpt stresses how important these law suits are and the implications on user-generated content.

The DMCA’s Safe Harbor provisions aren’t just important to video sharing sites; they’re important to almost every sector of Internet-based business.
“Nearly every major Internet company depends on the very same legal foundation that YouTube is built on,” said von Lohmann. “A legal defeat for YouTube could result in fundamental changes to its business, potentially even making it commercially impossible to embrace user-generated content without first ‘clearing’ every video. In other words, a decisive victory for Viacom could potentially turn the Internet into TV, a place where nothing gets on the air until a cadre of lawyers signs off,” he said. “More importantly, a victory for Viacom could potentially have enormous implications for Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, MySpace, and many other Internet companies, because they all rely on the same DMCA Safe Harbors to protect many facets of their businesses, as well. The stakes are high all around.”

10 Worst Consumer Tech Trends – Education Edition

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PC World has released an instantly popular list of the “10 Worst Consumer Tech Trends“. As soon as I read the list, it was easy to see the parallels in education. Thus, here’s my educational take on the list.

10. Closed Source Technology – I’ve been an advocate of FLOSS for quite a few years now, in fact, my dissertation had much to say about the topic. While we are nowhere near a world where Linux is ubiquitous, we’ve made a lot of progress through Firefox, Open Office and newer software like Google Android for mobile devices. In my courses, I make use of our Windows and Mac machines, but introduce many open source apps on the desktop. As well, Linux Live CD’s are used often to get beyond the tyranny of the desktop.

While we have a long way to go, my best indication of how far we’ve come is that the terms “open source” and “free software” (not simply a the “free in beer” sense) have become much more common in conversations with my non-techy students and colleagues. I think there are many experiencing a mental shift, however, we need to catch up through user interface and viral marketing approaches.

9. Over-promising and under-delivering: I’m still convinced that salesmen do more educational technology planning than educational administrators. I know of institutions locked-in to student administration systems like SCT Banner for periods of more than 10 years when (I’ve been told) there are other open source solutions available. I hear nothing but complaints from institutional users of Blackboard, people who’d rather learn Moodle on their own than go with the supported, Blackboard “solution”. IBM Learning Village is a common “instructional portal” in many school districts, one that has been abandoned by many teachers in favour of flexible, free environments, services like Ning.

And while we’re talking “over-promising, under-delivering” we can go beyond the issue of proprietary software. Larger, conceptual frameworks like course/student/learning management systems or just about any monolithic learning “solution” (or learning theory for that matter) can be critiqued in a similar manner.

8. Fanboys: “The definition of fanboy (or fangirl) is an individual who harbours a fanatic devotion to something without logical reason.” While at times I might be considered an Apple fanboy, I’d argue that I’m promoting a particular concept more than an specific product. I wrote a while back re: the Apple iTouch and the potential implications for learning. And while I love my iTouch, I was more critical to the fact that I needed to Jailbreak it before it actually became a usable, personal learning device.

And in relation to this point, I’m witnessing a disturbing trend in some parts of the edublogosphere as of late. I’ve ditched several, (once) trusted blogs from my reader in the past few weeks due to their less-than-critical, over-promoting of certain Web 2.0 tools and services. Note to those (few) edubloggers: if you’re on the take, your readers deserve full disclosure.

7. Region-encoding: I couldn’t think of how this applied to education in any significant way. Any ideas?

6. Licensing fees: Put simply, I do everything I can to avoid any content or products where licensing is required. I promote freely available media through such sources as the Creative Commons and Archive.org. As well, I nurture a learning environment where learners become producers nearly as much as they are consumers. At the same time, I do recommend exemplary copyrighted works, and do understand this livelihood model. However, the bar has been raised in relation to what I will spend money on. In this abundance economy, I need a strong demonstration of “value-added” before I ever consider pulling out my credit card.

5. Format wars: I haven’t much to say on this topic other than getting into a rant on the Open Document Format, and others have said it better. Anyone?

4. Proprietary file formats: Most proprietary products produce proprietary formats out of the box. Whether it’s a .doc, AAC or even .mp3, these formats can cause a huge issue, proprietary file format lock-in.

3. Annoying web ads: I won’t get into a rant against web-advertising. I am one of those people that pays to make my learning environments ad-free. For instance, I pay about $20/month to turn the ads off in my Ning groups, and I pay a smaller fee for my Wikispaces pages. For those in K-12, it’s great that you can turn off the ads in both of these services for free.

2. High cost of wireless data plans: It’s remarkable how many of my students have mobile phones. Even when I visit K-12 classrooms, the number of cell phones is high. For now, I can only dream of the possibilities for mobile learning. Our data plans in Saskatchewan and throughout Canada are simply too expensive to do anything creative. And beyond that, we’re not even at 3G yet. Maybe someday.

1. DRM: If DRM has done anything for our education system, it’s helped to nurture authentic, problem-based learning activities in our hacking communities. DRM does not work. It will never work. The system has to change. We are now seeing the power of an emerging, decentralized era. See Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails.

That’s it. Would love to hear your thoughts.

Teach, Don’t Preach

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My friend Peter Rock at gnuosphere always does a great job at voicing important issues that I’m sometimes weary to touch. Peter is confrontational on many important issues of freedom, such this one.

Peter reacts to a post from Teacher Jay who writes on his reflections in his classroom as he teaches his students why it’s wrong and illegal to download music content. Teacher Jay writes:

When the concept was explained that they were obtaining a product that they did not pay for and it was essentially stealing from the artist and the recording company they (the students) seemed to understand […]

Peter reacts, writing:

They “seemed” to understand because they’ve been told a subtle lie. What students need “explained” is that they have violated 20th century copyright law in need of reform to fit our 21st century technology. Then they need to see the difference between physical objects and intangible information. Then they need to see how Big Media ignores this difference every time it claims downloading to be “stealing” and that “piracy” must be fought to “protect the artists”. Students need to see that the analogy with sensate “products” is deceptive propaganda used to encourage thinking of copyrighted works as “property” when nothing could be further from the truth.

I may get some bashing here, but I agree with Peter. If you decide to react, read his point carefully. To describe the issue of music downloading without bringing in the contextual issues of corporate power over creative processes (read: culture), and simply telling your students that “it’s stealing, it’s illegal thus it’s immoral” is theft in itself. In very real terms, you are denying your students the liberty and freedom to critique issues of power in our society. Instead, what about being critical of the very idea of “intellectual property.” Or, what about discussing the potential benefits of free culture? No matter how you approach the topic, whether from a copyright or copyleft approach, critical debate on this topic is necessary. The world is changing for our students, there are many challenges ahead, and they need the tools to solve these issues themselves.

Additional note: I just noticed that Downes mentioned the book “The Starfish and the Spider” today on OLDaily. I read this a while back, and chapter one does an excellent job of explaining the need for decentralized leadership, and uses the music downloading developments since Napster as a key example.