History of the Information Age — Fall 2011

This past week, Claire and I led discussion on copyright and “copywrongs.” It went incredibly well–the class took the discussion and ran with it, discussing the ins and outs of copyright, patents, and licensing. Several people mentioned having enjoyed the reading, even though it was fairly dense. Claire and I had planned a class activity on infographics, as well, because part of our week was meant to be discussing that, but the reading discussion went so well we ran out of time to implement it.  All in all, that seemed to me to be a resounding success!

Also this week, we continued working on our final project for Info Age, which will be the documentary on DS 106, a Digital Storytelling class taught through UMW. We’re going to be talking about the class itself, and the various “generations”–the first generation, taught by an assistant professor within the Computer Science department, differed greatly from later “generations:” later generations were taught by computer savant/tech genius Jim Groom, from DTLT at Mary Washington. From its original iteration as a class within the Computer Science department, it’s become a huge multi-user opensource website (a “massive open online course,” or MOOC) and program that has participants from all over the globe visiting the site, ds106.us, posting, and participating in the discourse. We’ll be tracing its evolution and how it became such a massive platform, and examine various aspects of the question of how it fits into a Computer Science education.

In class on Tuesday, one of the things we discussed was the idea of copyright law and the original intention of copyright law to be leaky for purposes of things such as research fair use and being able to comment on others works. However, one of the areas I have always found rather murky was what exactly falls under fair use. According to copyright.gov, There are four areas that are taken into account when discussing the flexibility of fair use. The first area is whether the copyrighted material is being referenced in a work that is for commercial purposes versus non-profit educational purposes. This first area seems rather straight forward, until the part of about non-profit education material. How does one define whether something is educational enough to fit under fair use laws? Should the educational part of fair use only apply for the purposes of something directly related to school, or should be more loosely interoperated to such things as  Youtube reviews of TV shows? The second area is what exactly is the copyrighted work. This is the most straight forward of the areas to look at. The third area ask how much of the copyrighted work is being used. This is where things get murky again as it is unclear what is the maximum amount of say something like a football game can be used before it is a violation of copyright. The fourth and last area to consider, when determining whether something falls under fair use is what sort of impact at the work that requires fair use can have on the copyrighted work. Despite the intention of copyright laws to be broad to allow for some level of interpretation, this is one area of copyright I wish was better defined. It seems to me the lack of  clear definition of fair use is more to the benefit of the person holding the copyright, as they can ultimately define whether there work is being plagiarized.

So, I have made my first documentary.  I thought this was a fun, new and interesting project to do.  Being history majors, we never do things like this and it was god to look at history from a different perspective and seeing how certain things have changed over time due to technological developments.  The project was more time-consuming than I had originally anticipated and I think that was mainly due to the editing.  That took the most time and was difficult for some who were not very technologically savvy.  I think if there was a way to have a similar project with not as much technological knowledge need, it could have been more effective.  It was different gathering information for this project because we were forced to look at it differently and almost put our on spin on it while we were filming the movie.  This project was fun, new and different and could be even more effective for future students if the reliance on technology could be dwindled.

This week I lead discussion with Nicole and I thought that the readings we decided on using were really interesting. I never really though of copyright as such a complicated thing, all I personally ever used was “fair use”. I never knew that once you personally created something and put it down that it technically had copyright. I thought we did a pretty good job covering both of the chapters and having the class participate. I think we were also supposed to cover infographics during the discussion but for some reason it wasn’t posted and Monday night when we checked and saw that, we had to cut that part of our discussion out. We had an activity about infographics planned if we had time, but we went the entire time talking about copyright.

So the documentaries are finally finished, and with their completion some hard lessons have been learned.  Probably the single hardest challenge may have been getting all four people together at once with most of us having other full time jobs or engagements. The print add was an assignment that we were able to collaborate about without actually having to meet for, but in order to get all the pieces of the documentary together it was pivotal that we were all together at one time.  Another issue that we ran into and one that changed my mind about windows live movie maker was formatting differences.  Evidently windows LIVE movie maker was dumbed down to make creating a film easy for even an infant, and in doing so the new iteration of movie maker lost a lot of its key features.  for instance, adding music along with a voice over is impossible with windows LIVE movie maker, and even recording a voice over is disabled.  To overcome this and many other frustrations, I downloaded windows movie maker 2.6 for windows XP and finished up the documentary on there, adding the music that can be heard throughout the video as a layer over the “finished”product created with LIVE movie maker.

Overall the documentary was a solid success.  With more time and movie editing knowledge, more of our creative ideas could have come into play.  Originally I wanted this video to be Bill Nye the Science Guy-like, with cut shots and quips that were seemingly irrelevant but played into the overall comedy of the clip.  We negated this idea for lack of time and creative resources.  But I do thank the class and Dr. McClurken for the ability to do such a creative and unbelievably challenging project.  They all came out with a certain creative flair. Luckily this week is Thanksgiving break and will allow us to take one last deep breath before heading into the last few weeks of the semester.

There was a really interesting discussion this week about copyright and the laws that follow it.  I was very surprised to find out half the stuff I did about copyright law.  However alot of it was very confusing.  It was interesting as Ken discussed the way he uses pictures and what happens.  I was very intrigued by the discussion prompted by Professor McClurken.  Overall good discussion!

The documentary is done!  It was interesting to see how different departments saw the use of technology.  What I was pleased about was that the interviewees talked mostly about the positive aspects of technology, and that I didn’t really hear anything about the downfalls of the use of internet or computers on research.

I was reminded of the Chronicle article from about a year ago called “The Shadow Scholar: The man who writes your students’ papers tells his story,” and had expected at least one professor to mention cheating at the very least, maybe even discovering a student who had paid someone else to write their paper for them.

Instead, these faculty and staff members talked about how amazing it is that we can get online degrees, research using the library from home, and other aspects of learning that we had not thought possible ten years ago.  While I had gone into our topic thinking that it would be material I had already thought about, after the final product I finally realized that it really is amazing that we can get online degrees and research using the library from home.  If nothing else, it means that if it is cold outside I don’t have to walk from my house to the library to find articles and read books.  Instead, I can pull up the NetLibrary and take notes directly into Zotero, tagging it with keywords and information about where I will put it in my paper.  If I’m on campus with a few extra minutes to kill and I don’t have my computer with me, I can go to the library computers, pull up the card catalog and check out a relevant book.  It’s raining outside? That’s fine, I’ll just log into my Zotero and take notes directly onto my account, and then put the book back when I’m done with it.  It really is amazing.

The documentary is done!  It was interesting to see how different departments saw the use of technology.  What I was pleased about was that the interviewees talked mostly about the positive aspects of technology, and that I didn’t really hear anything about the downfalls of the use of internet or computers on research.

I was reminded of the Chronicle article from about a year ago called “The Shadow Scholar: The man who writes your students’ papers tells his story,” and had expected at least one professor to mention cheating at the very least, maybe even discovering a student who had paid someone else to write their paper for them.

Instead, these faculty and staff members talked about how amazing it is that we can get online degrees, research using the library from home, and other aspects of learning that we had not thought possible ten years ago.  While I had gone into our topic thinking that it would be material I had already thought about, after the final product I finally realized that it really is amazing that we can get online degrees and research using the library from home.  If nothing else, it means that if it is cold outside I don’t have to walk from my house to the library to find articles and read books.  Instead, I can pull up the NetLibrary and take notes directly into Zotero, tagging it with keywords and information about where I will put it in my paper.  If I’m on campus with a few extra minutes to kill and I don’t have my computer with me, I can go to the library computers, pull up the card catalog and check out a relevant book.  It’s raining outside? That’s fine, I’ll just log into my Zotero and take notes directly onto my account, and then put the book back when I’m done with it.  It really is amazing.

This past week we finished up our documentary and presented it to the class. Originally, we were planning our documentary such that we would have narration throughout, but we wound up not necessarily needing to, and decided that it was a less elegant solution anyway — that is to say, that it is more difficult to make audio narration sound elegant and professional. Our interviews wound up being comprehensive enough that we did not need to have narration providing the introduction, conclusion, and transitions. Our full story arc was depicted through the interviews, so we ended up using the narration at the end, as a sort of postscript, to fill in factual gaps such as what a card catalog is and when card catalog to digital catalog changes occurred. We decided to still have the narration because a lot of research went into it, and we felt it was valuable enough that even if we did not have it throughout the paper, we certainly wanted to include it. Overall, the documentary project was a lot of fun. It was definitely more work and more time-consuming than any of the previous projects, but it wound up being the one that was most unusual and novel for all of us in my group. AND–drumroll please!–we have decided to do a documentary for our final project, which will be on a class that was actually taught at UMW and wound up being a really unique class.