According to an announcement from the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), “last week, the Copyright Alliance Education Foundation (a nonprofit mouth piece for the entertainment and software industries) unveiled plans to spread its protectionist ideas to the nation’s schools and libraries through the distribution of a curriculum titled ‘Think First,Copy Later.’”

The EFF states that the “Think First, Copy Later” curriculum is similar in nature to other intimidating educational materials produced by corporate interests such as the MPAA, RIAA, Business Software Alliance — these types of educational materials are created, according to the EFF, to “scare students into believing that making copies is wrong.”

But what students and teachers don’t need, is more intimidation. Instead, the EFF recognizes that what is needed is “solid, accurate information that will help them make smart choices about how to use new technologies.” In response to this, EFF has just launched a free, Creative Commons-licensed “Teaching Copyright” curriculum and website “to help educators explore copyright issues in their classrooms.”

The materials appear to be very easy to navigate and understand, and will “encourage students to discover their legal rights and responsibilities — including how to make full and fair use of technology that is revolutionizing learning and the exchange of information.”

The EFF teaching materials and curriculum can be accessed here:

http://www.teachingcopyright.org/

We are currently meeting with the Samaritan (Shomronim) community, living in both Holon, Israel and on Mount Gerizim, West Bank as part of our NEH-funded research project. We’re doing interviews with members of the community about what they want to see in an online archive, and how they currently use digital technology.

The first part of our work began on Sunday, May 24 when we met with the leadership of the Samaritan community in Holon. After lunch we left Holon with Benny for Ben Gurion airport where we met Gus Walen and his son Eddie. Gus is the great-grandson of EK Warren, who was a benefactor to the Samaritan community in the early 1900s and who donated the MSU-held Samaritan manuscripts to the university upon his death. We then left the airport with Gus and Eddie and drove to Mount Gerizim in the West Bank, the home of the majority of the Samaritan community as well as their most important holy sites. Once we had safely arrived on the mountain we engaged several members of the community in brief usability interviews where we inquired into their access to and experience with digital technologies as well as their personal and social use of their sacred texts.

The next day (Monday, May 25) we had a series of meetings with many members of the community. The beginning of the day was spent touring the Samaritan village, including their school and their museum, where we we gained some insight into how Samaritan children acquire their literacies and the extent to which ancient texts form a core part of Samaritan identity. We were taken on a tour of several Samaritan holy sites, including their pilgrimage trail inside the remains of an ancient Byzantine fort. We met with their religious leader, the Samaritan High Priest Elazar ben Tsedaka ben Yitzhaq, who gave us significant insight into the community’s drive to preserve their sacred texts as well as a tour of his personal library. From there we were graciously invited into several community members homes, where we were able to discuss their family histories and how their texts are passed down from one generation to the next. We gained important insight into not only how their personally-held ancient manuscripts (many of which are older than anything in the MSU collection) continue to be used in rituals, but also how those texts are stored and maintained and how they are passed from one generation to the next.

Our work with the community will continue later today (Tuesday, May 26) when we will conduct formal interviews with several members of the community in Holon. We have been moved by the hospitality of the Samaritan community. They have opened up their homes to us and we are grateful for their continued support.

For photos of our trip, view Jim’s Flickr collection, Mike’s Facebook albums (group one and group two), and follow our Twitter stream.

By way of Bruce Maylath, I came across Cathy Davidson’s “Humanities 2.0: Promise, Perils, Predictions” (couldn’t find an online version, and so: PMLA, 2008, Volume 123, Number 3, pp. 707–717).

This is a pretty good read, as Davidson takes up some issues that have long perplexed me and made me think that the “crisis in the humanities” is largely a self-inflected wound.

For instance, she surveys the historical moment and wonders “why so many humanists feel irrelevant to a culture that names the “creative class” as one of its defining features.” She also uses this essay to detail the positive impact of digital technologies on very traditional humanities scholarship. Yet it is the very relationship between digital technologies and academic humanities is where the essay is too conservative. Davidson comes to the edge of understanding–or at least sharing her understanding–of how much the ground has shifted under traditional, university-based humanists.

We are all digital humanists now, and this is a very good thing.

The hedging begins with Davidson writing that “Perhaps we need a paradigm shift. Perhaps we need to see technology and the humanities not as a binary but as two sides of a necessarily interdependent, conjoined, and mutually constitutive set of intellectual, educational, social, political, and economic practices.” The fact that this statement contains a “perhaps”–two even–lies at the very heart of why university-based humanists have made themselves increasingly irrelevant to the practices and questions of the current moment. The fact that such interdependency requires a “paradigm shift” at all speaks to the conservative, even reactionary academic and intellectual politics of the humanities in too many institutions.

The hedging and conservative nature of Davidson’s essay is important because it reflects where the humanities are right now with respect to digital technologies and computer networks: unsure, wary, distrustful, critical, scared.

I am all for the “critical” part given that the outcome of the criticism is, as Latour argues, productive. But most interesting in Davidson’s essay is the door that she opens but doesn’t walk through, and that is the power of computer networks to provide platforms for flatter, more distributed work.

Davidson’s essay describes, accurately, that nearly all of the work in the digital humanities has been focused on making digital archives. The web as platform, and just as powerfully, the move from the page to the stream, has meant that, as long as the archives are open, anyone can use them. And as long as the archives are “Web 2″ archives, anyone can add content to them (WIDE has the most interesting Web 2 archive project going: see here). This means that nearly anyone can play in sandboxes once reserved for credentialed experts. Davidson’s essay usefully articulates a number of questions and concerns related to this destablization of expertise driven by a flatter way to generate humanities content.

Davidson argues that we should be helping to shape our digital present and future. The “we” in her sentence is the small group of credentialed humanities experts who pay attention to MLA publications, and that is the correct audience for her. “We” had better get with it, because the arts and humanities are alive and well, vibrant and useful, and deeply engaged in shaping the world that we inhabit. It is still an open question how important university-based arts and humanities programs will be as culture is made all around us.

Right now, “we” seems a little too focused on lamenting the fact that the world doesn’t understand the arts and humanities in the ways that we want them to and is not focused on how important the digital arts and humanities are in the lives of lots of people.

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.

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

I have been dwelling for some time with ideas for rethinking the professional writing major in response to phenomena that aren’t going away, such as the inadequacy of the university for life-long learning and the unsustainable way that public education is funded.

Life-long learning and development is a must, and somebody provides and will continue to provide learning opportunities over time. This is currently not the traditional university. Think here of the technical communicator who must now produce videos to support user learning. If that person received any school-based education for her job as a technical communicator, it almost certainly didn’t help her learn to write with video—and probably still doesn’t. At best—and this would be wonderful—it helped her learn how to learn.

Educational institutions are too rigid to accommodate this simple situation. We have no intellectual relationship with people over time, people who might purchase from us the education they need in their lives (and their numbers are large). We have no long tail (and our long tail would look different than Amazon’s anyway).

Furthermore, our current models of “delivering” undergraduate education are simply not sustainable. Most university education models are based on valuable content that is transferred to students. But having “content” as a value proposition is declining rapidly. Universities no longer control the distribution channel. Open educational resources, for instance, place the value of content itself at close to zero, and new ways to deliver content will continue to put tremendous pressure on universities. Educational programs predicated exclusively on owning and distributing content by itself are not sustainable. This model is too expensive, too slow, and increasingly irrelevant.

So what would it look like to restructure a major, for instance, as a learning community, as a community of practice? What—or where—is the value of a highly interactive learning program like our writing programs, majors, and graduate programs?

I would begin by restructuring the professional writing major around a set of competencies. Really challenging stuff. The notion of competencies is interesting to me as a way of anchoring a new approach to the major. In this new approach, the major would be characterized in terms of asking students to have X number of experiences, and each experience would be tagged to Y number of competencies. A major, therefore, is characterized in terms of demonstrating X competencies by way of Y number of experiences as a participant in a community of practice/learning. The competencies are stable—and least for a time (see below)—but the experiences are highly variable. A community of practice would need to revisit competencies regularly and seriously. Every 18 months. And it would need to offer a suite of experiences that would appeal to life-long learners.

There are a number of problems with this simple idea, of course. Here are two. One is a problem that I would characterize as a problem of theory. The approach I am outlining values change, but it should also value permanence and reflection. In fact, I think its power is in identifying habits of mind that translate and transfer, habits that enable learning, problem solving, theorizing. So theory, perhaps ironically, will likely grow in importance given a competency and experience-based educational program. The tough task will be identifying that which is more or less “permanent” and that which is more or less “dynamic.” What theories really matter and how do we require learners to demonstrate competency in something like “theorizing?”

Problem number two: Who has the faculty to pull this off? The administrative support?

Some additional implications that I think are exciting:

1. It will not have escaped anyone’s notice (who is still reading) that the boundaries between undergraduate, graduate, and life-long education blur, and this is a really good thing for everyone. This will present a number of challenges to institutional processes and category systems. We should welcome this.

2. The teaching and learning community that must be created and continually recreated—an activity that is productive in its own right and hopefully exciting—must of necessity become a research community. The model requires persistent research of our own work. So the educational program is also a research program.

3. This model requires a “skunk works” within it, which really should make everyone’s nerve ends tingle: a fluid group of people, students and professors working quickly on risky, innovative ideas that support the larger learning and research community. Skunk works initiatives have very short life spans. Groups should form and reform quickly. Failure should be celebrated. Success implemented.

4. Knowing stuff still matters a great deal. Universities have a brand that is still quite valuable, and the ability of a learning and research community to produce knowledge and make it actionable through a learning program is a big deal.

WIDE researcher Jim Ridolfo & WIDE interaction designer Mike McLeod are heading to Israel this week in conjunction with the Archive 2.0 Samaritan Scrolls project. While there, they will be doing community-driven design research with groups of cultural stakeholders in the project, members of the Israelite Samaritan community.

Mike & Jim will be accompanied by two other members of the research team: Sharon Dufour, North American Representative of the A.B. Samaritan Institute and a cultural liason for the project, and Janice Fernheimer, faculty member at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Fernheimer’s research expertise lies in Rhetoric as well as Jewish & Israeli Cultural Studies.

The WIDE team will visit cultural centers in two Samaritan community locations: Holon, Israel and Mt. Gerazim, the Samaritan’s Holy Site located in the West Bank. While there, they will conduct user-centered feedback sessions meant to inform the design of the MSU Digital Samaritan Texts Archive. The team’s methods borrow from several traditions of design research including Scandinavian Participatory Design, Contextual Inquiry in the North American Tradition, and Cultural Design as framed by Native American scholar Craig Howe.

The overall goal of the team is to engage cultural stakeholders directly in design activity, establishing a design “language” that is equally accessible to cultural and scholarly stakeholders in the Digital Archive.

“Our research and design processes for this trip amount to a very simple, but important goal: listening,” says Bill Hart-Davidson, WIDE Co-Director and Co-PI on the project along with Ridolfo.

Watch the WIDE blog for updates and pictures from the team!

Lee Sherlock’s article entitled “Genre, Activity, and Collaborative Work and Play in World of Warcraft: Places and Problems of Open Systems in Online Gaming” is available now electronically via the JBTC pre-publication site. Check it out!

Abstract
This article examines the characteristics of collaborative work and overlapping
activity systems in the popular online game World of Warcraft. Using genre
theory and activity theory as frames to work out the genre ecology of
gameplay, the article focuses on how players coordinate ad hoc grouping
activity across and through genres. It articulates the related development of
open systems in online gaming in a discussion of interface modifications
(AddOns) and online information databases that players generate, drawing
on De Certeau’s formulation of strategies and tactics and Warner’s
discussion of publics and counterpublics. The article concludes by discussing
implications of online gaming for an open-systems approach to information
design in professional communication and for professional communication
in general.

I have been reading John Borthwick on The Rise of Social Distribution, which I picked up via Jyri Engestrom’s stream. This is an interesting read for lots of reasons. He touches on content distribution models, noting that it used to be the case that one made money by controlling distribution channels (think broadcast TV).

Borthwick goes on to write \”In the initial design of the web reading and writing (editing) were given equal consideration–yet for fifteen years the primary metaphor of the web has been pagesand reading. The metaphors we used to circumscribe this possibilityset were mostly drawn from books and architecture (pages, browser,sites etc.). Most of these metaphors were static and one way. The steam metaphor is fundamentally different. Its dynamic, it doesntlive very well within a page and still very much evolving.”

Borthwick then spends a bit of time speculating about what the move from page to stream means for reading. And this is also worth thinking about. But there is no attention to writing. The social web–streams–are dependent on user generated content and lots of it (which Borthwick notes). This much is obvious and not particularly interesting.

What is more interesting to me, at least, are the issues of time and space. A stream, a real-time web, moves too fast to get a handle on. This is OK. We see and read what we see and read when we dip our big toe into the stream. With respect to writing, this deepens the challenge of making content that is more “sticky.” But the most interesting issue is perhaps the sorts of demands it makes on writing tools and processes. This is a significant opportunity for a task like “review,” which depends on an active stream to be useful. This makes me happy because we have a review service. Not clear what this will continue to mean for other sorts of writing tools except that it might mean the continued “breaking up” of writing tools into more or less independent services.

The most compelling issues of all are for rhetorical theory. This is where we need Jim Ridolfo to chime in on rhetorical velocity and Stewart Whittemore on the implicatons for memory.

Testifying in DC before the US Copyright Office regarding DMCA 1201 exemptions

Last week on May 6 and 7, 2009, I traveled to DC in order to testify at the tri-annual rulemaking hearings, Library of Congress, James Madison Building, before the US Copyright office in support of certain exemptions to the anti-circumvention provisions of section 1201(a)(1), USC Title 17 (commonly called the DMCA or Digital Millennium Copyright Act).

During the next few weeks, with the help of the WIDE Research Center, particularly Mike McLeod, I’m going to create an annotated archive and resource regarding these hearings, because the issues raised are important to many of us.

For now, I provide you an interesting example of the kinds of issues discussed during the hearings. The below link goes to a 16 minute audio file extracted from the Mp3 files created by the copyright office, covering the question and answer period in the morning of May 7, 2009. In this audio file, Steve Metalitz, attorney representing the MPAA: Motion Picture Association of America, RIAA: Recording Industry Association of American, AAP: Association of American Publishers, ASMP:American Society of Media Photographers, AVA: Alliance of Visual Artists, BSA: Business Software Alliance, DGA: Directors Guild of American, Inc., ESA: Entertainment Software Association, PACA: Picture Archive Council of America and Bruce Trumbull, attorney representing the DVD Copy Control Association, Inc., answered questions from David Carson (General Counsel) and Rob Kasunic (Principal Legal Advisor) of the US Copyright Office.

https://www.msu.edu/~courantm/DMCA/Q&Avidders_metalitz_turnbull_copy-access.mp3

A number of interesting issues are raised in this brief question and answer extract:

1.How can we differentiate between circumvention for purposes of copying versus circumventing to gain access, considering that only the latter is prohibited by 1201(a)(1)?

2.As technology develops, how should we think about screen capturing software in the context of “anti-circumvention”?

3.What is the role of the statutorily conferred rulemaking abilities of the US Copyright Office with respect to exemptions from 1201(a)(1)?

4.How should we think about trafficking of the tools of circumvention, clearly prohibited by 1201(a)(2), versus the use of such tools (not prohibited)?

The main issue, for my purposes, at this year’s hearings was whether or not the exemption achieved by University of Pennsylvania film studies Prof. Pete DeCherney (he’s locatable on twitter) three years ago will be continued and hopefully expanded for all students and teachers. The exemption he admirably gained for the academic community in 2006 is set to expire in October 2009. This is the exemption:

“Audiovisual works included in the educational library of a college or university’s film or media studies department, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of making compilations of portions of those works for educational use in the classroom by media studies or film professors.”

The brunt of my testimony took place on May 6, and I’ve extracted an excerpt featuring this testimony from the copyright office’s files.

https://www.msu.edu/~courantm/DMCA/may7/martine_courant_rife.mp3

I argued for the exemption to be expanded as follows:

“Motion picture and audiovisual works released on DVD, housed in a US library collection where the student attends or where the teacher is employed, or legally obtained and owned by the teacher/student,where circumvention is undertaken solely for the purpose of extracting clips for inclusion in videos or multimedia texts that do not infringe copyright and that are composed either as part of student coursework or as part of course curriculum. This exemption shall apply even for works that are gifted from students/teachers to community groups/non-profits as part of service learning or community outreach.”

My testimony was also supported by my request to testify, a handout, and an audiovisual demonstration.

Rife’s Request to Testify

Rife’s Handout

Rife’s Summary of Audiovisual Demonstration

In the coming weeks, I will update you on the progress of the annotated archive that I will create with the assistance of WIDE. Thanks for your interest.