With the pioneering efforts of MIT’s Open Courseware initiative it will be interesting to see what happens to academic conversation as various universities publish their courses openly – which MIT hopes they will do and which some are starting to do. Already OCW reports that 1 in 7 visitors is a teacher/professor trying to improve, augment or check their own material to improve their own teaching of subjects.
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Copyright or Copywrong
Interesting session at the Instructional Technology Institute at Utah State about copyright issues. Larry Lessig from the Stanford Law School gave a little history lesson on the way copyright law has changed since it’s inception. It started as an opt-in program where work was only copyrighted if the creator of intellectual property registered it and marked it. Unless they renewed it the copyrights only lasted 17 years. In 1976 it became an opt-out system where every creative work was copyrighted by default unless otherwise stated and it lasts much longer than 17 years. I think it is easy to see that that is in direct conflict with current technology which makes creative works much easier to produce and thus much more numerous. I liked the way Larry differentiated between original creation and remix creativity. Those derivative works are a large portion of what gets people into copyright trouble today and they make up a large portion of the creative work being churned out today.
I found it extremely ironic that the courts use case law all the time where they look at and reference previous opinions – sometimes to agree and sometimes to disagree – as the basis of the opinions in new cases. These are the people that have consistently ruled that there should be severe restrictions on reference and repackaging of creative works.
I am attending the instructional technology institute this week and I will be blogging things that I think during sessions. This will not be notes on the sessions so much as thoughts elicited by sessions.
The IMS machine readable notation system – part of IMS LD – could be the basis of a notation system for instructional design which allows us to talk about instruction. We would need to have it become human readable before it would actually be useful in teaching ID. This kept reminding me of a session on notation systems by Andy Gibbons and Sandy Waters given here last year.
According to David Wiley it will take a lot of work before it could serve that function.
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Instructional Design as a Conversation
I read a copy of this presentation from when Andy Gibbons gave it in Orlando in June 2004. Being in a live session was interesting as one of the participants in the session suggested that the trial and error method of learning something was inherently inefficient. I wondered once that comment was made if perhaps efficiency is not always the best standard of what we should be doing. Perhaps the “inefficient” method causes the information and knowledge to be more firmly grounded in the mind of the learner. The second thing is that there is a chance that the trial and error method may in fact cause the interactions of the various pieces of information to be more firmly linked in the mind of the learner.
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Upstanding
I think that David has captured one of the keys to being a dependable voice in the blogosphere as he talks about childish behavior. One of the things that really tells me that a blogger is fair and civil in their discussions is when they can accept comments of disagreement without getting petulant or childish. Deleting comments falls in the class of childish – my policy is to never even consider deleting a comment except for the “comments” left by bots as popularity boosting links to online casino’s and the like; those get deleted and banned.
My viewpoints disagree with the viewpoints of David Anderson somewhat regularly, but he has consistently proven himself to be mature and civil. His thoughts are honestly held and fairly well thought out. For all these reasons he is one of the people I most enjoy reading.
I have been preparing a talk about balance based on Doctrine and Covenants 10:4. It has been interesting finding material and noticing how general the topic of balance in life is. I have categorized the general areas of balance as: internal balance, interpersonal balance, and balancing your responsibilities. I have also noticed a connection between all three types of balance – the only way to achieve any of those areas of balance effectively or sustainable is by seeking balance using eternal principles to guide the priorities which define the balance we seek.
I have thought of a good analogy for balance. I am still working on the details and I will post them here as I round out the image, but here is the basic gist of it.
Consider the gyroscope; when it is stopped it is impossible to have it stand up for any sustained period of time. When the gyroscope is spinning it will stand on its own, the faster it spins the more stable it is. When it is very fast it is so stable that we can use it as a means of guiding much larger objects such as airplanes.
What is our gyroscope? – I believe that our values are our gyroscope. Those values are only stable if the gyroscope is spinning. The way we spin our gyroscope is to do the little things that keep us in touch with God and ourselves. These things include regular prayer, scripture study and meditation or introspection.
That’s all on balance for now but I hope to add more soon.
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GMAIL
I have a Gmail invitation available if anyone is interested.
I enjoyed reading this editorial but whether it is the right thing to do or not I am sure that it is not realistic to expect president Bush to specifically condemn the attacks on John Kerry.
One of the major differences between those attacks and the ones aimed at the president is that the attacks aimed at the president were happening before John Kerry was even chosen as the Democratic nominee so nobody could say that he is orchestrating them. The complaint that George Bush is behind these attacks is unfounded. He does not need to be behind them to get people to attack John Kerry. The fact of the matter is that radical Republicans don’t like John Kerry any more than radical democrats like George Bush.
I was interested as I read this article from Wired Magazine about the new opportunities in politics for people to define themselves outside the strictly Republican vs Democrat framework. Instead they can define themselves in contrast to a party affiliation. The example in the article is Governor Schwarzenegger who is a Republican, but is much more centrist or liberal position on many issues than the National Republican party.