Taking control of fair use – (Peer-Reviewed Monday)
June 29th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
And… on a Monday even. What are the odds?
This article (PDF) picks up on the post last week about Emily the Strange and Nate the Great. In terms of creativity, transformation, fair use and — what this means for those of us in libraries, those of us who teach, or those of us in higher ed.
Aufderheide, P. (2007). How Documentary Filmmakers Overcame their Fear of Quoting and Learned to Employ Fair Use: a Tale of Scholarship in Action. International Journal of Communication [Online], 1 (1), 26-36
And it might not mean the same things for all of those groups, even given the overlap that must exist between them, because what this article is arguing is that groups like teachers (or even like teachers who teach specific things), or like librarians should take the time and spend the energy it takes to define for themselves what constitutes “Best Practices” in their field or community, when it comes to fair use.
Backing up – the authors claim that fair use is kind of the forgotten strategy of intellectual property, that the lines between fair and unfair use can be blurry, that there’s a lack of clarity about what it means and that people and institutions are nervous about asserting it. By defining Best Practices, creating a statement that clears up some of the ambiguity surrounding fair use, a community can add clarity to the process and increase the likelihood that people within the community will assert their fair use rights. Beyond that, the authors argue that a best practices statement also has legal value, that courts do consider the norms within a community when deciding whether or not a use is fair.
The case study example the authors use is documentary filmmakers. This was a group that really needed clarity about fair use, but that wasn’t widely using fair use. The authors started their project with by doing long interviews with documentarians and found that there was confusion about fair use, misunderstandings about the law, and a lot of fear out there about being sued:
Documentarians were avoiding a wide range of subjects including political and
social commentary, musical subjects and popular culture generally. They routinely altered the reality of
the localities where they captured images, and they also changed both sound and picture after the fact.
These documentarians also pointed out that they did not totally control what got used and what didn’t. Even if they wanted to go the fair-use route, those who made it possible for them to broadcast or distribute their films had bought into the “permissions culture” and the only way to safely use copyrighted works.
Now, to me, this sounds familiar – there is a lot of acceptance of permissions culture in higher ed, I think. And in libraries. And while a lot of teachers I know may not necessarily think they should have to get permission for the things they use in the classroom, the gatekeepers above them (especially when we’re talking about using digital materials in the classrom) do.
So, after doing the interviews, the authors identified the different ways that documentarians use copyrighted information, and which of those uses the community members identified as “fair.” They also asked “if someone who was not you was using your material in that way, would you still consider it fair.” From this, they identified a set of best practices, things the documentary community thought constituted fair use of copyrighted materials: Documentary Filmmakers Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use.
Then, they looked at the legal record. They found that where challenges had been made, the defendents often won, for doing things that the community had considered fair. Where the defendents lost, they had been doing things the community had rejected. So the community had done a pretty good job defining its own practice.
The authors identified 3 main questions the courts had asked when deciding fair use cases — these questions dealt with:
- the transformative nature of the new work — if something new was created out of the copyrighted material/ significant value was added, then the use was more likely to be considered fair. If the copyrighted material was simply being re-used for its intended purpose, then not so much.
- the good faith of the defendant.
- the best practices of the community – was the use “reasonable according in the general opinion of the field or discipline within which it was made?”
The best practices idea is also important because no single case will ever provide clarity on fair use – so long as the law depends on precedent and precedent is by definition situational, it can’t.
The authors conclude by arguing that there was an almost immediate, practical shift in how the community approached questions of fair use (and they built upon that argument further here). All of a sudden, authors were asserting fair use rights, using the document to support them. With further, active outreach, fair use became a part of the conversation in a way it had never been so before.
The implications of this for teaching and learning are probably pretty clear, as another area where best practices should be definable. Indeed, the next project outlined on the website is on a topic not only of interest to instruction librarians as teachers, but specifically as information literacy teachers. In 2006 the Berkman Center released a white paper about best practices for digital learning. The Center for Social Media picked up the thread with a Best Practices document specific to Media Literacy education — specifically teaching students about media (not just using media to teach students about any topic): The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education.
Media literacy, defined here as “the capacity to access, analyze, evaluate, and communicate messages in a wide variety of forms.” The overlap there with information literacy is obvious, and the document has a lot of relevance to information literacy teachers. More than that, doesn’t it show what we could do, or should do, in our communities (higher ed and librarianship) to take control of this issue for ourselves?
SLIM Information Literacy class
June 27th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
LibrarySecrets (and on Twitter)
Web 2.0 tools by Bloom’s Taxonomy Levels
Toolkit
Scholarship
Scientia Pro Publica blog carnival
On Newspapers as Sources (A Historian’s Craft)
The Academic Manuscript (Wicked Anomie)
Useful Chemistry (Open Notebook Science)
- Useful Chemistry wiki
- Chemistry Crowdsourcing and Open Notebook Science (Nature Precedings)
BBC Memoryshare – visualization + history
June 24th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
I have only spent 7 minutes in here, but I am already in love. From the BBC – Memoryshare, “a place to share and explore memories.”
It’s a totally fun visualization tool – a sliding timeline down the left side of the screen lets you drill down to a year and browse through people’s memories from that year.
From the stuff you read in history textbooks — Queen Victoria’s funeral procession in 1901 (1901!!)
“Well, I was thrilled to the marrow. Because I had never seen troops of soldiers, I had never seen mounted police. Being brought up in the country, I had never seen a crowd.” (Mrs. G.S. Freeman)
To the stuff you don’t – like the day John Ballam met his wife (1987)
Compared to where I grew up the UK seemed terribly crowded and also the university issued very careful guidelines about how to anticipate violence and certain areas to avoid and of course having grown-up in the middle of nowhere this seemed to be very shocking so I got myself a roll of ten pences and carried them in my hand to defend myself.
(via infosthetics.com)
comics & copyright, but not comics-specific
June 19th, 2009 § 7 Comments
I don’t know how many of you are aware of the explosion of copyright discussion surrounding Emily the Strange and Nate the Great (and the alleged intersections between the two). I read probably more than my share of comics news, and most of it entirely passed me by.
At issue, does this character:
equal this character:
(The one in the top right corner).
It’s an interesting case if you’re interested in copyright, copyleft, creativity and the like – Shaun outlines a lot of the salient points here – both about the situation itself, and about the discussion of the situation.
Because there’s a picture going around that looks like this -
He argues, really well, that to focus on that physical similarity is to miss the point, or what should be the point:
However unoriginal her figure maybe, Emily is not a direct copy of Rosamond. She is an adaptation. Most importantly, the two characters exist in entirely different contexts. The fact that Rosamond is a supporting character in someone else’s narrative while Emily is at the center of her own storyworld, is, or should be, the most salient point in this discussion
….
Copyright should afford people, and notably the actual creators of a work, protection against actual plagiarism, or at least a right to proper attribution, but that is a far distance from being able to lock up all references to, pieces of, or derivations of a work, especially in, or something very much approaching, perpetuity. The fact that creators and other copyright owners feel compelled, and empowered, to assert such rights is a threat to continued creativity.
Lots to think about.
Motivating students in the one-shot (peer-reviewed Monday)
June 8th, 2009 § 3 Comments
Okay, not really. And OMG Peer-Reviewed Monday is back! But there are connections to the one-shot here, really.
One thing that came out, over and over, in the research that Kate and I just presented at WILU was the idea that student in information literacy classes aren’t motivated to do the work, and that the instructors in those classes have to work super hard and super constantly on engagement.
So this special issue of the Journal of Research in Science Teaching caught my eye because of its focus on motivation. And this article in particular further caught my eye because of its focus on situational interest.
Palmer, D. (2009). Student interest generated during an inquiry skills lesson Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 46 (2), 147-165 DOI: 10.1002/tea.20263
(I couldn’t find an online copy, even though this is a Romeo green publication)
Palmer defines “situational interest” in contrast to “personal interest” where the latter is a deep, lasting, engaged interest in a topic or domain. The former, in contrast, is “short-term interest that is generated by aspects of a specific situation.”
The relevance to information literacy instruction is obvious when Palmer’s example of the kind of “situation” that can spark “interest” is a particularly engaging or awesome demonstration. Like I said, one idea that came through in many, many stories we gathered was the idea that if we as librarian instructors can be engaging, exciting, fun and compelling enough, our students will be motivated to learn.
Palmer synthesizes several factors that lead to situational interest from the literature: novelty, surprise, autonomy, suspense, social involvement, ease of comprehension and background knowledge. So one could expect that there are things that could be in an IL session that are not spectacular demonstrations that could still tap into this idea of situational motivation – content they’re not expecting (novelty and surprise), giving them real, authentic choices (autonomy) and group activities (social involvement).
So on to the study itself – Palmer’s purpose was to evaluate different parts of a science lesson to determine how much situational interest was generated, and to identify the sources of that interest. Students participated in a 40 minute lesson (the topics of the lesson varied, though the basic structure did not, to protect against the possibility that some topics are just more motivating than others). The data gathered was qualitative, gathered via group interviews at the end of the lesson.
His population was younger than you’d find in my academic environment – 14-15 years old. And, of course, they were studying science, not library research. On the other hand, he chose a hands-on lesson, delivered in one shot, which does have relevance for my sessions.
The results are interesting in part because of how similar they are, in some specific ways, to the ways librarians and faculty describe student library research skills. For example, the researchers examined how students engaged in inquiry skills (problem-setting, observation, reporting, analyzing, etc.) during the lesson. While they had many chances to use these skills, most of the time they “were not of a high standard.” Students were more likely to describe their method than articulate meaningful questions, and more likely to describe their experiment than analyze their results.
When it comes to motivation, students demonstrated a significant preference for certain parts of the lesson. The experiment was broken into the following pieces for analysis:
- Copying Notes
- Demonstration
- Proposal
- Experiment
- Report
- Copying Notes 2
Of these, students showed the lowest amount of interest during the Copying Notes phases, by a lot. Anyone surprised?
Of the others, they showed the most interest during the Experiment phase, with Demonstration next. Both of these were noticeably higher than Proposal and Report. The two pieces with the highest level of interest total, also had high levels of interest in terms of how many students showed that interest. 95% showed interest during the Experiment phase, and 90% during the Demonstration.
In the interviews, students said copying notes wasn’t interesting because it was what they were used to doing in science class. That’s kind of sad. This piece was to get at the domain knowledge piece needed for motivation, but there must be a better way to do that. I copy notes on my own motivation regularly, but it sounds nightmarish as an in-class activity.
Learning came up over and over as a source of interest, which explains the popularity of both the Demonstration and the Experiment phases. Students in 68% of the groups said that having a choice about what to do was a source of interest, even though it only really came up in the Proposal phase. Physical activity was also a source of interest, and this one connects most strongly to the Experiment phase. Novelty and surprise came in a little lower. These codes actually came up most often in the Demonstration phase. Palmer points out, however, that the learning they said they liked could in fact be a form of responding to novelty – enjoying the learning because it was something new.
Palmer, in fact, seems to credit most of the “learning” responses to the idea of novelty — he concludes that 3 factors are most responsible for student motivation:
In summary, it has been argued above that the situational interest experienced by students in this study was basically derived from three separate sources — novelty, autonomy (choice) and social involvement.
The decision to dismiss learning as a factor here seems a bit abrupt. I would have liked to see it unpacked a little more – as it is, I don’t see the evidence Palmer saw. This connects to the biggest gap in the paper, from my perspective – the fact that there’s no reporting of any assessment of the learning that did happen in the lesson in this paper, with the exception of the evaluation of their inquiry skills (which is presented separately from any content or domain knowledge learning).
It seems a little incomplete to talk about motivation to learn without talking about learning. As Palmer says himself:
a student might be very highly motivated to learn in a lesson, but if the teacher does not use appropriate teaching techniques by guiding and scaffolding the direction of learning, then very little science will be learnt. For optimal learning to occur, motivational strategies need to be used in tandem with instructional strategies which focus on the development of scientific understandings.
One of the inherently interesting things about this paper for instruction librarians is its focus on immediate classroom practice. There is nothing in this research method or in the analysis of the results that wouldn’t totally apply to the one-shot, which is pretty rare in the education literature. Of course, the author counts this as a limitation in the study, because real inquiry “is usually developed over a longer time frame than the 40-minute procedure used in this study.” But still, his limitation is our relevance.
Connected to this is his finding that there is a lot of variability in situational interest throughout this lesson. The different pieces were only a few minutes long, so that suggests that students’ interest and motivation can change very quickly. On the one hand, this suggests that we could lose them quickly. On the other hand, it also suggests that perhaps we shouldn’t worry so much about those normal ebbs and flows. If one piece isn’t hugely motivating to them, the next one could be.
Other implications for instruction librarians are found in the lit review, Palmer uses research that suggests “multiple experiences of situational interest” can develop into long-term interest. At best, this suggests that students would need repeated exposure to awesome information literacy teachers to develop a long-term interest in research or inquiry just from IL classes alone. In fact, Palmer suggests that one reason for the mediocrity he observed in inquiry skills was the fact that students didn’t really have the experience with independent inquiry to know how to talk about what they were doing.
Situation motivation seems like a fruitful line of further inquiry for instruction librarians, though even this easy intro to the subject suggests that it’s not a panacea for what ails the one-shot, or for what ails the librarians who teach too many of them.
evaluation – do I care?
June 6th, 2009 § 2 Comments
if we define “good information” as something that makes you go – “OMG I have to find out more about that” instead of defining it as something that makes you go “wow, I never knew that and this source is entirely trustworthy so it must be true and I don’t have to look into it any further” does that change how we think about evaluation?
(yes, I read a cool thing on the Internet before my coffee was ready)
