posted May 20, 2009 by Bill Hart-Davidson
Martine Courant Rife, JD, PhD, will present arguments before two panels at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, May 6-7, on the subject of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Rulemaking. Rife will make her case before the Librarian of Congress, James Hadley Billington, and the U.S. Register of Copyrights, Marybeth Peters.
The U.S. Copyright Office is conducting the rulemaking proceeding as mandated by the DMCA, which provides that the Librarian of Congress may exempt certain classes of works from the prohibition against circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works. As set forth on the U.S. Copyright Office web site, “The purpose of the proceeding is to determine whether there are particular classes of works as to which users are, or are likely to be, adversely affected in their ability to make noninfringing uses due to the prohibition on circumvention of access controls.”
For the first panel, Rife, who received her PhD in Rhetoric and Writing from Michigan State University in 2008, will argue for exemption to the DMCA for students and teachers who want to cut into a DVD and copy snippets for fair use to create either classroom teaching materials or produce student projects.
“I’ve been aware for awhile that film teachers had received an exemption from the DMCA for fair use of films, and talked to some colleagues to learn more about the process,” Rife says. “I then drafted a document in support of an exemption for DVDs, and was selected to participate and present.”
Currently a professor in the Writing Program at Lansing Community College, Rife will use survey results from her PhD research to support her argument for an exemption.
“I will be citing results from an empirical data study that I conducted of nearly 400 respondents commenting on their knowledge of the existence of a chilling of digital communication and free speech due to copyright law, and the perceived level of chilling,” says Rife. “Titled ‘Rhetorical Invention in Copyright Imbued Environments,’ my dissertation included research that surveyed professional writing teachers and students in a random sampling from across the country, including input from 64 professional writing programs, as well as interviews with seven digital writers.”
Rife will also be presenting an example of the type of student-created scholarly work that would be covered by an exemption: a digital documentary that includes clips from various films to challenge the stereotypes of African-Americans as they appear in movies.
In her presentation to the second panel, Rife will argue in support of an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) exemption request “aimed at protecting the video remix culture currently thriving on Internet sites like YouTube. The filing asks for a DMCA exemption for amateur creators who use excerpts from DVDs in order to create new, noncommercial works. Hollywood takes the view that ‘ripping’ DVDs is always a violation of the DMCA, no matter the purpose.”
““In the course of my research,” Rife says, “the teachers that I spoke with related the problems that they were experiencing with copyright law. Students would come in with an excellent piece of work that clearly made a cultural or political statement, but it was obvious that they had broken copyright law to produce it. The teacher is then forced into the quandary of having to either enforce copyright law for the government, or look the other way.”
Adds Rife, “Seeking an exemption seemed a good way to carry forward the concerns of the teachers and students that I had interviewed, and in a sense, pay them back for their participation as unpaid survey respondents. Above and beyond that, many believe that it’s also the right thing to do.”
For more: the beyondwords blog
posted June 22, 2009 by Michael McLeod
Last week, Kirk St. Amant of East Carolina University visited MSU and offered a workshop and a presentation. Both were very well attended events. Below, we\'ve provided a short summary and a link to a PDF of slides from each event.
The Academic Book: An Overview of the Review and Publishing Processes
[slides]
This objective of this workshop is to provide an overview of the decision making process associated with publishing an academic book. In so doing, the workshop will examine
•How market factors and prospective readership can influence the publishing process
•How the review process of book proposals and book manuscripts operate in general
•What factors to consider when selecting a press and drafting a book proposal
•What factors to consider when trying to convert a dissertation into an academic book
Participants are encouraged to bring draft book proposals – and even draft introductory book chapters – to the workshop for discussion and review.
Online Education in the Age of Globalization: Trends and Considerations
[slides]
Online education has opened the classroom to students from around the world. Yet global access to online classes and online degree programs is but the first step in creating effective international learning environments. This presentation will provide an overview of the global market for and international interest in online education. In so doing, the presenter will discuss what aspects educators and administrators should consider in order to develop an effective online learning environment for individuals from other nations. The presenter will also examine what aspects educators should consider when organizing and overseeing an online class comprised of students from different nations and cultures. The presentation will conclude with a discussion of strategies administrators, educators, and students can use to develop more successful international online learning environments and experiences.
Speaker Bio
Kirk St.Amant is an Associate Professor of Technical and Professional Communication at East Carolina University and is the Editor of the Texas Tech University Press Series in Technical Communication and Rhetoric. His research focuses on globalization and its effects on industry and educational practices.
WIDE would like to thank all of our fellow co-sponsors for both events: the MSU Graduate School, College of Arts & Letters, The Writing Center, The Department of Writing, Rhetoric, & American Cultures.
posted May 20, 2009 by Jeff Grabill
Jeff Grabill spoke about digital writing on May 15 at Cool U, an event hosted by the College of Arts and Letters at MSU.
Cool U is designed for adults who lovelearning. Cool U features four lectures from professors from the College of Arts and Letters along with museum and library tours.
Grabill\'s talk was entitled “Kids Today Love toWrite, Do it Constantly, Do it Well (but don’t know that they are doingit): Digital Technologies, Social Software, and their Impact onWriting.”
Full details here.
posted June 3, 2009 by Bill Hart-Davidson
WIDE researcher and recent Rhetoric & Writing MA graduate Jake McCarthy\'s research is featured in the article \"Finding Usability in Workplace Culture\" published in the June 2009 edition of Intercom, a publication of the Society for Technical Communication.
The article addresses the complexity of assessing usability in workplace settings where a myriad of factors can influence how, let alone how well, a particular technology functions. McCarthy and Hart-Davidson, co-authors of the piece, discuss the ways an ethnomethodological approach to usability analysis can be beneficial in such settings:
\"Keeping an eye on office politics and entrenched practices while searching for usability issues gave us a unique view of the decisions writers made while interacting with the CMS. Instead of recording the length of time and number of steps required for people to complete tasks, we focused on the cultural motives for completing tasks differently than we had anticipated. Certain traditional usability problems turned up through our
observations, but our presence in the work environment made the workplace
culture impossible to ignore.\"
Though not suitable for every project, the longer \"dwell time\" and more in-depth relationship building that went into the project discussed by McCarthy & Hart-Davidson can be indispensable when the design of a new workplace tool is so integral to the core mission of an organization.
posted June 22, 2009 by Michael McLeod
Last week, Kirk St. Amant of East Carolina University visited MSU and offered a workshop and a presentation. Both were very well attended events. Below, we\'ve provided a short summary and a link to a PDF of slides from each event.
The Academic Book: An Overview of the Review and Publishing Processes
[slides]
This objective of this workshop is to provide an overview of the decision making process associated with publishing an academic book. In so doing, the workshop will examine
•How market factors and prospective readership can influence the publishing process
•How the review process of book proposals and book manuscripts operate in general
•What factors to consider when selecting a press and drafting a book proposal
•What factors to consider when trying to convert a dissertation into an academic book
Participants are encouraged to bring draft book proposals – and even draft introductory book chapters – to the workshop for discussion and review.
Online Education in the Age of Globalization: Trends and Considerations
[slides]
Online education has opened the classroom to students from around the world. Yet global access to online classes and online degree programs is but the first step in creating effective international learning environments. This presentation will provide an overview of the global market for and international interest in online education. In so doing, the presenter will discuss what aspects educators and administrators should consider in order to develop an effective online learning environment for individuals from other nations. The presenter will also examine what aspects educators should consider when organizing and overseeing an online class comprised of students from different nations and cultures. The presentation will conclude with a discussion of strategies administrators, educators, and students can use to develop more successful international online learning environments and experiences.
Speaker Bio
Kirk St.Amant is an Associate Professor of Technical and Professional Communication at East Carolina University and is the Editor of the Texas Tech University Press Series in Technical Communication and Rhetoric. His research focuses on globalization and its effects on industry and educational practices.
WIDE would like to thank all of our fellow co-sponsors for both events: the MSU Graduate School, College of Arts & Letters, The Writing Center, The Department of Writing, Rhetoric, & American Cultures.
posted July 1, 2009 by Bill Hart-Davidson
Participants in \"Visualizing Patterns of Communication in Digital Workspaces\" at the 2009 Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute spent two and a half days learning to use analytic techniques developed by Spinuzzi, Zachry, and Hart-Davidson such as Genre Ecology Models and Communicative Event Models. The conference was held on the Penn State University campus in State College, PA.
Zachry & Hart-Davidson will present a one-day version of the workshop this Fall at the upcoming SIGDOC conference in Bloomington, IN.