Competing copyright curricula

A recent eSchoolNews article about dueling copyright curricula couldn’t have surfaced at a more opportune time, seeing as how I literally just days before had utilized some materials from one of the curriculums in question.

On the one hand, the Copyright Alliance Education Foundation (CAEF) recently published Think First, Copy Later, seen by some as slanted toward the interests of copyright owners.

On the other hand, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), unveiled Teaching Copyright. The EFF is characterized as an advocacy group that serves the interests of users and consumers of digital media.

Admittedly, I was not aware of the CAEF curriculum when I recently selected and distributed some of the EFF’s support documents to a group of pre-service teachers at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. But I am inspired by the prospect of having access to and using “dueling curricula,” if and when I teach about copyright again in the future.

What an opportunity for teachers to exercise professional discernment! What an opportunity for students to see copyright law presented from two different perspectives — owner versus user, industry versus consumer! What an opportunity to engage higher-order thinking and some good, old media literacy skills, such as evaluating audience, authorship, message, and meaning!

Teachers need these resources now more than ever. It was not too long ago that teacher training on the vagaries of fair use doctrine were conducted in the faculty workroom, usually between classes, as we waited in line at the photocopier. We traded in stories, myths, and half-truths and competed for bragging rights to the title of “Greatest Copyright Infringer.” We made half-joking references to a sinister, Gestapo-like “Copyright Police” waiting in the wings. (I know. I was one of those teachers.)

The surge of web-based information and communication technologies makes it easier than ever to facilitate content creation and sharing in our classrooms, but we must first be equipped to engage students in conversation about content creation that is safe, ethical, and legal.

The alternative is to do nothing for fear of violating the law. This phenomenon was documented by Hobbs, Jaszi, and Aufderheide in their 2007 report for the Center for Social Media, The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy. In 2008 the Center published the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education, which states that fear and confusion about copyright:

detracts from the quality of teaching. Lack of clarity reduces learning and limits the ability to use digital tools. Some educators close their classroom doors and hide what they fear is infringement; others hyper-comply with imagined rules that are far stricter than the law requires, limiting the effectiveness of their teaching and their students’ learning.

Check out the accompanying video:

technorati tags: copyright fair use participatory culture media literacy student engagement

Featured student blog: meet Ann

Cross-posted at Fireside Learning and Classroom 2.0.

Many teachers shy away from contemporary music. Why? It could be because their own teachers did the same.

That quote comes from Ann, an aspiring music educator at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. She and 14 other pre-service teachers are enrolled in a section of IT486, Intro to Instructional Computing, that I am teaching this summer. The course examines how to use technology to support teaching and learning and is designed to prepare novice teachers to integrate a variety of computer-based technologies.

One aspect of the course design that I really enjoy and value is the blog for reflective journaling. This is a required component. During the first week of the course, each student signed up for a blog at Google’s Blogger. They were given a certain amount of license in the look and feel of the blog, but the overarching rationale for the pre-service teacher blog is the same: to develop and practice the reflective process. (More on that later.)

But why blend an introspective mode of writing such as journal writing with a public medium such as blogs?

As Christopher Sessums maintains:

Collaborative weblogs promote the idea of learners as creators of knowledge, not merely consumers of information. A collaborative environment like the one I’m suggesting can allow peers to be seen as valuable sources of knowledge and ideas; a connection that participants can rely on beyond any formal classroom structure, i.e., collaboration leading to a community of interest.

So to that end, I have been making readerly comments on each pre-service teacher’s blog, and I am encouraging the class to follow, read, and comment on each others’ blogs.

And now, to go a step further, I seek to shine a spotlight (or, in the case of our music major, “sound a trumpet”) on some provocative posts in hopes of inducting our novice edubloggers into some of the wonderfully generous and nurturing networks of teacher/learners that have supported me in the past — communities such as Fireside Learning and Classroom 2.0.

Ann’s commentary on the state of music education strikes a chord because she describes a phenomenon that transcends content area and grade level: teachers tend to teach in the manner in which they were taught. Why is this so? How do we press forward into new realms of teaching and learning and resist falling back on tired and familiar practices that have outlived their effectiveness for today’s learners?

What do you think? I invite you to visit Ann’s blog and share your thoughts and feedback with her.

technorati tags: collaboration communication teacher/learner teachers edublogs blogs reflection mentoring uTenn

Know the feeling

Now I get it all -- all at once! Help!?!

I love this sentiment! It perfectly encapsulates the classroom teacher’s state of mind when faced with the full potential of the read/write web.

The quip belongs to Peter Lane, a California middle school reading and technology teacher.  I stole it from his profile in Classroom 2.0, an online professional network that, if you are a teacher even remotely curious about technology, you must visit!  In fact, Peter’s expression could serve as the tagline for the whole Classroom 2.0 site, which exists, in part, for those “beginners” who seek a “supportive community and a comfortable place to start being part of the digital dialog.”

For his part, Peter is engaging his students in the “digital dialog” using a mix of young adult literature, blogs, and wikis. Take a look at Mr. Lane’s Effective Reading Blog.

technorati tags: instructional technology teachers networking teacherLearner Classroom2.0 web2.0

21st century mentoring

I just completed an independent inquiry on the implications of Web 2.0 on mentoring and induction of new and novice teachers. The project spanned two semesters, and I learned a lot.

I am posting the final report in PDF. I also have a companion wiki, which is still in development. Stop by for a visit and tell me what you think!

For crying out loud!

A longstanding critique of instructional technology is our penchant for adopting whizbang tools only to reinforce traditional pedagogy rather than transform it. Technology interventions in the classroom often bear the mark of “old wine in new bottles.”

Here is the best evidence to date: a March 16 New York Times feature on the increasing use of amplification systems in U.S. classrooms.

So all that handwringing over how to transform instruction so no child is left behind was for nothing? The children simply weren’t hearing us?

Here is one particularly troubling passage from the article:

The West Orange district [in New Jersey] decided to require amplification after seeing the first-grade reading scores at one school, St. Cloud Elementary, skyrocket to 89 percent at or above grade level at the end of the 2003-4 academic year, from 59 percent before teachers started speaking into microphones.

“That got everybody’s attention, as you can imagine,” said Karen Tarnoff, the district’s testing coordinator. “There was nothing else over the course of the year that was different than in any other year. The teachers and the curriculum remained the same, and nothing new was added other than the amplification system.”

But, of course! Test scores are what drove the reform! (The reform, by the way, comes with a price tag of $1,000 to $1,500 per classroom.) What is even scarier is a testing coordinator who brags that nothing changed in her district for an entire year in terms of evolving instructional practices or curricular approach.

Thankfully, other perspectives are represented in the story. David Lubman, a fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, calls it for what it is: a “triumph of marketing over science.”

What do you think?

technorati tags: teachers student engagement technology instructional technology

My first lil’ mashup

The assignment seemed a little old-school: simply make a PowerPoint presentation and embed a sound clip. Come on, do I really have time for this?!

But it was a way for our professor to engage us in a rudimentary form of “remix” and “mashup,” common practices among youth that were mostly unfamiliar to us teachers enrolled in this semester’s reading education seminar on multiliteracies at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. For that reason, I could appreciate the professor’s pedagogy: giving a purposely unstructured assignment with minimal parameters and setting us free to playfully explore the potential and pitfalls of computer-mediated content creation.

Still, as you will see, my resulting slideshow (or “screencast”), is decidedly teacher-centered and bears that unmistakable corporate imprint that only PowerPoint software can convey — so clean, so slick, and oh so sterile. (The 2-minute, 30-second presentation is designed to be a conversation starter for teens and teachers about the obstacles and opportunities involved in “growing up digital.” It also ties into a thematic, annotated reading list I compiled on the subject of digital literacy.)

Nonetheless, I am proud of my lil’ mashup for three reasons:

1. Although I did rely on the ubiquitous and wholly familiar PowerPoint application, I prepared my sound clips using Audacity, a free, open source, cross-platform audio editor. Through trial and error, I learned to import and edit music files, cut and paste sound clips, and export a wav file, essentially creating the “soundtrack” for my slideshow.
2. To push my content out to the wider Internet audience, I used a free Web 2.0 application called SlideShare. SlideShare enables users to upload PowerPoint slides and create a product that is truly replicable, shareable, embeddable.
3. Before I could turn my uploaded slideshow into a “screencast” with synchronized music, I had to convert my wav file into an mp3. For this operation, I tried a free demo version of Switch Sound File Conversion Software.

Whew! All this without benefit of teacher, textbook, user manual, or live help desk. Just experimentation with a bit of obsession thrown in.

My biggest take-away? The amount of time and dedication it took for me to undertake this style of self-moderated, trial-and-error learning. These are the new literacy practices that many young people regularly engage in outside the confines of the traditional classroom. Amazing!

Overall, I am pleased with the results. What do you think?

technorati tags: new literacies mashup remix teachers teacher learner UTenn multiliteracies music participatory culture

Constructive advice

As is wont to happen on the Web, I found this terrific quote by scientist John Seeley Brown by way of this article about communities of practice at The Learning Circuits Blog, which I found by way of this post by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach about virtual communities. In an interview with Line Zine editor Marcia Conner, Brown spoke eloquently about learning, knowledge, and the relevance of constructivism:

We tend to forget that learning and sense-making go hand in hand: we tend to forget that for the learner, the student, there’s always this sense-making going on even if we, as teachers, think everything is clear. Now, suddenly, teachers have been thrown into the same kind of chaos as their students. This has created a symmetry that really focuses on how we need to jointly learn together.

What a gift it is to celebrate balance and harmony amidst “chaos”!

What do you think?

Techno wars: Boomers vs. X’ers

Hello, friends.

I am conducting another little study for a statistics class I’m taking this semester. This project is about testing the statistical versus practical significance of two sample means.

Don’t ask.

Just please help out a poor, mathematically challenged grad student and follow the link below to a quick, anonymous online survey. Thanks!

Click here to take the online survey!
Powered by Wufoo

By the way, AFTER taking the survey you may enjoy reading the New York Times column that inspired the survey topic. (I’m withholding comment for fear of influencing the survey results.)

Education informatics and the teacher/learner

It’s been more than a week since Clarence Fisher delivered his K-12 Online Conference keynote about web-based tools and their potential impact on relationships, pedagogy, curriculum, and information access in the classroom.

Arguing that “technology is not about skills, it’s about connections,” Fisher concludes his presentation by calling for reform of technology assessments that are too narrowly focused on the acquisition and demonstration of skills. Fisher says that what is needed instead is a tool for generating “education informatics.” This application would allow teachers to track students’ actions and activities on the Internet and to monitor and assess their progress as they build out virtual networks.

I’ve been thinking on this for several days. Now, as I am currently immersed in the Professional Learning Networks strand of the K-12 Online Conference, the concept of education informatics is growing more relevant and urgent.

By all accounts, the old model of “sit and get” professional development delivered by high-priced outside experts is on the way out. Like student learning, teacher professional development has the potential to become more personalized and self-directed within the new Web landscape.

And, as with students, education informatics for teachers could provide invaluable feedback and transparency about the breadth and depth of their online learning.

In my community the local school system recently reduced the number of systemwide professional development days and tripled the number of hours (from 6 to 18) that teachers must document unscheduled inservice learning. There is a tremendous opportunity here for teachers to set aside time for unstructured experimentation with the many cutting-edge, web-based tools and receive credit for their effort!

But how many of our administrators are equipped or even willing to acknowledge learning pursued via wikis, webcasts, chats, forum discussions, and so on? I think documentation and accountability would be huge issues to overcome, unless they had access to a state-of-the-art technology assessment such as Fisher describes.

If teachers are to be the models of lifelong learning, we must be willing to allow others to examine that learning under the microscope of education informatics.

And that’s what I think.

“Smart mobs” are great, except in school?

Cross-posted at Classroom 2.0

Today’s top story from eSchool News Online is “Smart mob” tech spurs student activism by Nora Carr. The article begins with the student protests in Jena, LA, and explores how blogs, RSS, text messaging, cell phones, and wireless technology are leveling the playing field and having a democratizing effect at all levels in educational institutions.

Carr cites the work of Howard Rheingold, who coined the term “smart mobs” in a 2001 2002 book by the same title. Rheingold envisioned both the disruptive and democratizing effects of global, pervasive, wireless computing.

I was really enjoying Carr’s balanced presentation of the issue. She even discusses how teachers in various academic areas might use recent events such as the Jena protests and the current presidential campaign to engage young people in a critique of these powerful technologies.

Then, oddly, she writes:

While most school leaders undoubtedly applaud anything that gets young people involved in civic affairs, most also would agree there’s an appropriate time and place for such actions–and that’s typically after school or on the weekends, and not on school grounds.

I am not sure how to interpret the above statement. Is it an endorsement, or is it simply a statement about the status quo? As a columnist, it’s certainly Carr’s prerogative to impose her viewpoint where appropriate, but in this case it just seems contradictory. How can she in one instance encourage teachers to capitalize on the “powerful learning opportunity” represented in cases like Jena and the democratic rebellion in Myanmar, and then suggest that the technologies that mobilize citizens for the greater good still have no place on school grounds or during school hours?

That just doesn’t compute (sorry for the stupid pun).

It would be nice to engage in a dialogue with Carr about her story. But eSchool News Online doesn’t provide any contact information for her, and the site doesn’t provide a means for users to comment on stories either. Apparently the site does host discussions on certain stories for users who register for TypeKey accounts. I registered for an account but couldn’t locate any threads or forums related to Carr’s article.

Frustrating.

So, what do you think?