Month: December 2012

by Clint Lalonde on All the rest, Open

What we can learn about copyright from fashionistas

I have a whole new respect for the fashion industry after viewing this brilliant TED talk from Johanna Blakely called “Lessons from fashion’s free culture.”

In a nutshell, Blakely’s argument is that an entire creative ecosystem and industry has developed around fashion because fashion cannot be copyright. Indeed, without the ability for one designer to copy (or be “inspired”) by the work of another, there would be no fashion industry as we know it today.

Under the law, fashion designs are exempt from copyright. You cannot copyright a design because lawmakers view clothing as a “utilitarian” product. The common good of clothing humanity overrode the rights of fashion designers to profit from their clothing. But because there is no copyright, designers have been able to freely elevate that utilitarian product (clothing)  into something that is now considered art.

It is a compelling argument in support of copying as a model of ownership that encourages innovation as copying allows for the the free flow of ideas, and this free flow of ideas drives innovation. It forces those who are being copied to continually “up their game” and create unique designs. Copying forces innovation and creativity.

But this lack of copyright isn’t limited to fashion. Cars, food, furniture – these are all utilitarian items that cannot be controlled by copyright (which begs the question in my mind, when does something like a smartphone or computing device become a utilitarian device so that the silly litigation wars from Apple and Samsung?)

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

I remember Kamloops

jim

Thanks to an invitation from my TRU colleague Brian Lamb, I was lucky enough to find myself attending A Day for Learning at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops last week. It was a wonderful day and I fear that I have taken away much more than I contributed to the success of the event.

The day underscored for me that I need to have these types of events & discussions at my institution. Set aside some space and time, bring together the right people and spend a day talking about teaching and learning, innovation & dreams. It is easy to become insular in any position within an organization, and this event illustrated how valuable it is to bring a diverse group of people from across the institution together. Personally, it came at exactly the right moment for me as I have been grappling with issues of leadership and what that means. This day was a shining example of the types of things leaders like Brian, Irwin DeVries and Christine Adam do, and something I want to recreate at my institution soon.

I also had the opportunity to meet and hang out with a couple of very smart people; Jeff Miller from UBC and one of my EdTech inspirations, Jim Groom from UMW in Virginia, who both came to TRU as a special guest speakers for this event.  Although it sounds contradictory, Jeff gave (in the course of 90 minutes) an expansive, yet beautifully concise, overview of how higher education has changed, taking us back to the birth of higher ed in our province right up to MOOC’s. It was an engaging and interactive session that showed what a skilled and knowledgeable facilitator Jeff is.

Jim followed with a presentation on innovation that revolved around the wonderful Culture of Innovation video that came out of UMW a few months ago. I found the video utterly inspiring the first time I viewed it several months ago for a number of reasons, not the least of which was for the type of institutional buy-in that Jim and the DLTL crew has managed to garner with their ideas and innovations. But having Jim there to break down the video and explain (in as much detail as he could in an hour) the methods behind his madness grounded the inspirational aspect of the video for me. I want to flesh out some thoughts, especially around the concept of A Domain of Ones Own, in a future post as it is the type of initiative that aligns well with my underlying philosophy of the importance networked learning.

There were other takeaway moments. Three students sharing their observations about learning and what engages and motivates them to learn, including the revelation from a particularly focused online student who made Instructional Designers around the world gasp when they boldly stated that they never did coursework in their online courses, only assignments.

There was also a poignant and moving opening address from TRU elder Estella Moller, which evoked some pretty powerful personal memories of my roots growing up with a father who taught trades at a college in a predominantly First Nations community in Northern Alberta. As a long, but important side note, if you are interested in the history of higher education and First Nations in Canada, I urge you to watch the 20 minute documentary on the history of Portage College that shows how it came to be.  It is a powerful story of determination, resistance, community action and the belief that education is a transformational experience and the key to a better life.

I think I have more to say about the ideas that came out of the day, but for now just end by expressing my thanks to Brian, Irwin and Chris for including me in the day, and hope I can return the invitation in the near future.

 
by Clint Lalonde on All the rest

Supporting what I use

This past week, I have been spending money, primarily getting ready for the upcoming holiday season. But along the way I’ve also been spending some money and supporting a few of the free online services and products that I rely on everyday.

My first stop, the Wikipedia store, where I dropped $25 on an “I Edit Wikipedia” shirt, some stickers and pin. Mozilla was next, where, for $30, I got a nice, new Firefox t-shirt. $30 at Creative Commons snagged me a t-shirt, some stickers and pins.

Now, even though I get some nice stuff out of this, I didn’t do it because of the t-shirts, stickers or pins. It’s not about the schwag (although it’s nice to have a sticker on the laptop to show support and raise awareness). And I don’t see this as charity. I am not doing this for altruistic reasons. It’s selfish, really. I want these services and products to survive because I use them – no, I RELY on them, every day.  In my mind, this is a payment (albeit small) for services and products I use. They are valuable, and I would miss them if they were gone.

I financially support these organizations for the same reason I support The Knowledge Network and other public broadcasters – because I get something of value from them and I think they should be acknowledge in a way that means something to them. They need money to keep doing the work they do; work that is generally free from commercial interests, which is something that is harder to come by on the web these days, especially in education where the VC money is calling the shots on so many “innovations” revolutionizing education.  Personally, I would rather pay transparently up front than have what I see as valuable become commodified and commercialized.

Last night, after reading George Siemens post (and subsequent rich conversation between George and Scott Leslie in the comments), I added Hack Education to my list and made a payment to Audrey Watters for $25. A small price to pay to someone who I (and many others) see as an invaluable, independent voice in the EdTech maelstrom these days.

 

Georges post also made me realize that I should be explicit about these contributions and transactions. His post was a prompt for me – a reminder that these free services we rely on need to be supported in real and tangible ways, and pushed me to action. Georges post was my prompt. Maybe this will be yours?

 
by Clint Lalonde on Open

And without doing anything, I created an Open Educational Resource

Last week I let loose a rant against Turnitin and a poster they sent me which painted the acts of remixing, mashups, aggregation and retweeting as plagiaristic.

Tonight I receive a pingback notification from a blog being used in an open online high school Philosophy 12 course being offered by Bryan Jackson. Bryan has included my blog post as a suggested reading for his unit this week on Ethics in his open online class for students interested in discussing the ethics of intellectual property.

I don’t know where Bryan saw this post. He might be subscribed to my blog, a colleague might have passed it to him, or he might have caught it on Twitter as we are connected there (and I have a pretty good idea where he did see it). But he would have never seen it at all if I had confined my rant to my office colleagues and not decided to put fingers to blog and post something in the open space of the web – something that another educator could find and link back to.

Which goes to underscore a point that Scott Leslie has been making for years about sharing and serendipity:

Much of the sharing that happens in my learning network happens through serendipity. People publish a blog post, bookmark a delicious link, etc, as a normal part of their own workflow,and whether through syndication or the “All seeing eye of Google,” it comes my way, as John Krutsch would say, “Right On Time.”

A normal part of my workflow is writing blog posts and publishing on the open web, then disseminating that via Twitter, Facebook, & (increasingly) G+. All that backroom posting to those networks happens behind the scenes. I’ve spent some time setting up this blog to post to those networks, where it was picked up by another educator, who then decided to use it as a resource in one of his classes.

Without doing anything extra, I managed to create an educational resource for another educator.

Okay, maybe it isn’t entirely true that I have done nothing. I did have to do a few things to make that happen. I had to create the ecosystem to make sharing possible. But that work was done years ago when I made the concious decision to publish on the open web with a Creative Commons license that allowed for reuse (which didn’t even need to be in place for Bryan’s case as he has just simply linked back to the blog post and not actually copied or reused it). But that’s it. That’s all I had to do. The simple choice of deciding to post on the open web with a license that allows for reuse means that something I create (whether I think it is useful or valuable or not) can be used by another educator.

With those 2 conditions in place – open and licensed for reuse – everything I create and publish here becomes an open educational resource, free for any other educator to link to, copy, use and modify as they see fit.