My two thoughts:

First, Copyright law, always complex and mushy and interpretable, is widely misunderstood and/or ignored in academia.  It is by me.  Take eReserves, for example, something I was discussing with a colleague the other day in relation to course packs.  At EMU, eReserves is the library’s “electronic reserve” system that allows someone like me to put various copyright-protected materials “on reserve” in the form of PDFs that students can download for free.   Many institutions have such systems.  The advantage of eReserves for me is I can add and subtract readings whenever, including the middle of the term (that’s just flat-out impossible with a course pack), and “free” is obviously much cheaper than even the most inexpensive course pack.  But as I understand it, it is actually illegal to repeatedly make available for free some copyright-protected text via this system.  In other words, with essays I teach pretty much every term, like Walter Ong’s “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought,” I’m supposed to put that into a course pack so that the copyright is cleared and students pay the royalty.  Another example:  as I understand it, if I show a movie in a class, I’m technically supposed to pay the copyright holders of that film some sort of screening fee, unless I’m showing something that the university has already paid some sort of royalty on already.  (I may be very wrong about this one).

The point is this:  I don’t know anyone who treats eReserves this way, I wouldn’t even think of asking for permission to show a movie in a class, and I don’t really care about these potential copyright violations for admittedly mushy and ignorant reasons.  The way I figure it, no one is going to sue me over eReserves or showing a movie in a class or committing any other copyright crime; at worse, they are going to send me a “cease and desist” letter.  Instead of worrying about the legal ramifications of getting various permissions for use of these materials in my classes, I worry about how reading the things I assign might actually “teach” my students something.  Let the lawyers sort out the copyright violations.

Second, I have been thinking lately about jailbreaking my iPhone.  As most 3G users know, the new iPhone 4 operating system slows and/or crashes older phones.  Quite a bit, actually.  Eventually, I’ll get a new phone, though I am not entirely sure when.  On the “early-side,” maybe I’ll try to justify the iPhone 4 as some sort of Christmas present; on the “late-side,” maybe I’ll hold out for whatever is next (iPhone 5? iPhone 4S?), which, according to MacRumors (they say that the average “update” cycle for the iPhone is 218 days), would probably be sometime between about March and May 2011.  So in the meantime, I kind of feel like I have nothing to lose with attempting the various jailbreak options that are out there; heck, it might even help my older phone work “better.”

• There’s something interesting? odd? ironic? well, maybe just something– about how people seem to be rediscovering the privacy issues here a couple of years after the conventional wisdom for sites like Facebook and MySpace is that “kids” were being pretty stupid by putting up stuff that will come back to haunt them later. I realize that part of this new wave is a result of Facebook’s increasingly squishy privacy issues, but some of it also has to be because the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is “grown-ups” who supposedly know better.  And who don’t.
• The concept/definition of “privacy” is not exactly stable, and this is by far from the first time that it’s been a contentious and potentially interesting issue. Remember Jennicam? Interestingly enough, the Wikipedia page I am linking to here says that Jennifer Ringley, who once pretty much broadcast “everything” out to the web, says she is now “enjoying her privacy.”  And maybe that’s part of what the deal is here too:  a lot of people kind of went a little over-board on the whole Facebook thing and now want to scale back a bit.
• A lot of the complaints about Facebook seem to forget that it is not a “public space” or a completely free “community asset.”  Sure, they might be kind of asshole-ish as of late with various policies (not to mention just kind of tone-deaf to public critique), but they are a business that is trying to make money.  Part of the way they do that is by using your content; if you don’t like that, then don’t put up your content.
• On the one hand, I don’t really care that much.  I mean, I’ve already got over 1600 pictures on Flickr all pretty much share-and-share-alike and there’s this and previous blogs; it’s not as if I’m leading that super-private of a life as it is.  And given that folks are okay with Amazon and Netflix making “choices” for you based on stuff you’ve browsed before, I don’t see exactly what is so wrong with Facebook targeting ads at you and treating your pages as if they are not completely private.  On the other hand, all of this dust-up is a reminder that Facebook is a public space, that those updates and pictures and stuff you post really can/will be seen by lots of people.
• 16 or 15 years ago, I remember going to a talk at BGSU where someone was talking about this newfangled “email” system that was going on campus, and the presenter warned people then of their privacy:  don’t email anything you wouldn’t want to see showing up on a billboard or in the New York Times. That’s probably a little extreme for email nowadays, but words to live by on the book o’ face.

Anyway, today in Inside Higher Ed, I read “No Grading, More Learning,” which is about a “non-grading” scheme Duke University professor Cathy Davidson had as she returned to the classroom after being out of it for a number of years in administration.  To quote from the article:

Her plan? Turn over grading to the students in the course, and get out of the grading business herself.

Yeah, I don’t really understand what that means either….

Just to be clear:  I’m not saying that Davidson was doing anything bad.  I’ve done all kinds of different things to experiment with grading in my classes.  For example, I have students at all levels do a self-assessment for their participation grade, mainly because I want students to be “self-aware” that what they do (or don’t do) and how that leads to a particular grade.  People have done various kinds of contract grading in writing classes for years, and I think Peter Elbow and one of his colleagues had an article in College Composition and Communication a while ago about the “B” contract grade, something that I’m toying with laying out to students the next time I teach 328 in the summer term.

That said, this article and some of the responses to it does raise a few issues for me.

• Whenever I hear a teacher/professor say something like “students just did ‘x’ all on their own, just because they could, I had nothing to do with it,” my bullshit detector goes off.  I was at an academic conference recently where a presenter spoke about how his/her students “just did stuff” magically spontaneously in the course this person was teaching. I almost said “yeah, right…” out loud. Like I said, I don’t quite think this is what Davidson is saying here, but when she does make the claim that she didn’t grade at all, that it was all based on “crowdsourcing,” that the students had control, etc., etc, when she says stuff like that, well, the bullshit detector doesn’t go off, but it does rattle quite a bit.
• Note that she is teaching at Duke University, which is the kind of place where, if nothing else, students have an acute understanding of what it takes to get certain kinds of grades and to succeed academically. And this is not a class of first year students either, meaning that they were probably already far enough along to understand the “game” method that Davidson was “playing” employing. And note also that this was a class of less than 20 students, a size that makes this sort of alternative “non” grading a manageable task.  Try this in a lecture hall of 250 first year students at a place like EMU and see how it turns out.
• I think it’s interesting that this approach to grading turned out “perfect.” Davidson even gave herself an “A+.” I suppose I have already covered reasons why it might have turned out as great as it did– fantastic students at a fantastic institution in a small class, and perhaps they were prodded along a little more than Davidson suggests to make the “magic” happen.  And let’s give Davidson credit– I’m sure she’s a good teacher. Still, there weren’t any students who weren’t a little freaked out or bothered by the whole thing? I don’t know….

  Whenever I ask students to self-assess themselves for participation, I always get at least one or two who avoid the process, usually because they say they “don’t feel comfortable” giving themselves grades.  Then there are students who, as part of the self-assessment process, ask how many “points” some sort of activity is worth; when I tell them I don’t keep points like that, they look at me sort of confused, as if I had said “I don’t believe in gravity.”

  And then there are of course the grade-grubbers (“I have to get the highest grade you have ever awarded to anyone or I simply will not be able to live with myself and you will have my death on your mind forever and ever”), the slackers (“Dude, can I still pass this class if I don’t turn in the last three assignments?  No?  How about if I handed in one of them?”), etc., etc., etc.  We’ve all been there.

  Davidson tries this once and it works out perfect?  Really.  Really?

• Finally, it is at times like these, times when I really don’t need to be thinking about grades at all, where I contemplate once again designing the course so that it is worth 1,000,000 points.  Basically, this just adds some zeros to the percentages (I suppose I could make the whole course worth just one point, too), but when I did this years and years ago, it did spark some interesting conversations with my students, conversations like “I think you’re going to need to pick up 50,000 points on these last two assignments to get a B-.”

Anyway, some thoughts on the term that was, the coming spring, and other things, in no particular order:

• I’ve done more rethinking about 328 in the last two years than I think I did in the first ten years of teaching the class, experimenting with new assignments, changing orders of things, changing from the emuonline CMS to a WordPress-empowered web site– engl328.stevendkrause.com — and I already know about some other changes I will make in the summer term too.  I think that’s been one of the anticipated benefits of bringing in a new guy with new ideas about the course.
• Oh, and I will not be returning to emuonline for a CMS anytime soon.  I might put up some protections on the wordpress installs for 516 and 328 though, particularly 328.  In 516 (that is, “Computers and Writing, Theory and Practice”), the openness of the class site worked great because we had about a half-dozen of the authors of articles we were reading stop by and participate in the discussions.  But in 328, I think the publicness of it all kind of scared a few students off.
• The next time I teach 328 (in the summer), I think I am going to have a peer review experience that requires students to get feedback from a reader from outside the class and report back on that experience.  I keep trying to impress upon students the idea that they need to keep that magical audience of a “reader beyond the class” in mind, but it seems like this is very difficult for most of my students to imagine in the abstract.
• It is really interesting to me how radically the “same class” (more or less) can be with different students.  My section of English 328 in the fall term was, to put it charitably, “problematic;” this term, it was great.  As I wrote about here last year, my graduate class last year was not the best, in part because of a rather troublesome exchange I discussed about a year ago here. I mean, I have always known that no two classes are ever the same because of the differences in readings, discussions, assignments, and students.  I guess I’m just struck now how a few really “bad apples” (which I did not have this term) really can make a huge difference for the worse.

Anyway, farewell winter term….

Blackboard plans to announce today the release of a new version of its widely used e-learning suite, with an emphasis on incorporating social networking tools such as wikis, YouTube, Flickr, and Slideshare. “We provided a very intuitive process to search for and add content from YouTube, Flickr and Slideshare to a course without ever having to leave the LMS,” said Stacey Fontenot, a Blackboard vice president, in an e-mail.

So, why is this a plus? What is the problem with having students experience the internets the way that they experience it in every other way? As far as I can tell, the answer is teacherly control, surveillance, and grading. I don’t completely dismiss the value of such things, but is it really a selling point to anyone who uses stuff like Blackboard that you never have to leave the comfort/control of the course shell?

It’s not that I disagree with them– at least not exactly.  I think there’s a lot of potential for Twitter like they are talking about, forming community around a topic/affinity of some sort is one of those ways.  They had a lot of great ideas and suggestions for some software tools to make Twitter work better for this.

Still, why just Twitter?  The responses they are giving me when I asked this question on the ATTW twitter feed were that things like blogs weren’t as successful, that Twitter was easier/blogs were harder, etc., etc.

I dunno.

Like I said, I like Twitter quite a bit, but I also like blogs and facebook and all kinds of stuff.  I think most of our students are the same way.  So it seems to me that these tools can play off of each other quite well, as I’m trying to do here.

And this is more than 140 characters.

Web standards are important, and Daring Fireball adheres to them. Specifically, Daring Fireball’s HTML markup should validate as either HTML 5 or XHTML 4.01 Transitional, its layout is constructed using valid CSS, and its syndicated feed is valid Atom.

If Daring Fireball looks goofy in your browser, you’re likely using a shitty browser that doesn’t support web standards. Internet Explorer, I’m looking in your direction. If you complain about this, I will laugh at you, because I do not care. If, however, you are using a modern, standards-compliant browser and have trouble viewing or reading Daring Fireball, please do let me know.

Heh.  Perhaps I’ll come back to this in 444.

• SecondBar allows you to have a menu across two monitors, which is how I roll on my desktop computer.  Not sure if it works yet or not, to be honest.
• “Let Us Now Trash Famous Authors” by Christina Davidson is an article/web piece from The Atlantic might be useful for 621 in talking about why it is really important to be careful about how we work with “subjects” (e.g., “people”) in our research.  Davidson goes back to the town of Moundville, Alabama and retraces some of the history of James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which is about sharecroppers during the depression and which is also famous for having some iconic depression era photos by Walker Evans.  Well, when Davidson tries to talk to some people about it all, the only ones she (apparently) can find who know the book feel like it exploited and humiliated the families.  Which I think just goes to show you that we always have to kind of careful about what we think will be “harmless” research or writing.
• “No Ink, No Paper: What’s the Value of an E-Book?” is an NPR story that argues, basically, that publishers ought to move aggressively to e-books and take their substantial losses now instead of waiting for the inevitable.  Interesting points.
• Chicken chicken chicken, which figures very briefly into my CCCC 2010 talk.
• “Thank Sex for Making the Internet Hot.” I have always said that when it comes to figuring out what advances in technology matter, look at porn.  As I understand it, when man figured out how to fire clay into things, the first things they made were not pots for holding stuff but sex toys.  I might be wrong about that.  Anyway, this is an NPR story in which an actual technology historian talks about how sex paved the way for many new technologies, with a fair amount of focus on the internet.
• “The Posting Hour” is about insomniacs and forums like Facebook.  Kinda interesting, I guess.
• And finally (for now), there’s the Google Apps Marketplace, which looks to be a sort of “App Store” for things Googley.  I haven’t played with it much yet so I don’t know how useful it might or might not be, but it was an open tab, so there you have it.

What I like about this right now is the “show” aspect– that is, the chance of sharing a fair chunk of video from RiP: A Remix Manifesto. What I don’t like about it is the same thing I don’t like about most conference presentations, that “unfinished” feeling.

Oh, and by the way, the other reason I post these things nowadays on the ole blog here is because this spiel is likely to get more readers/hits than the actual talk itself in Louisville before I actually give the talk.  But that is perhaps a different story.

More CCCC 2010 updates soon.

Three somewhat related thoughts about it all:

• This was an interesting viewing experience for me, one that was “live” and “present,” but also “not” and removed.  Lessig was live in a lecture hall at Harvard, and I watched it with about 25 people at EMU (including Derek and a couple of students from my 516 class who made it out) in a room in the library with a large projection screen and a very nice sound system.  While Lessig talked, I also watched Twitter stream by with the #wireside hashtag. So it was like being there– actually, in some ways cooler than being there since a similar experience was going on at 40 different sites all over the world at that moment.But it was also not at all like being there.  I saw Lessig talk live at the CCCCs in San Francisco back in 2005, and I think he is the undisputed king of delivering incredible conference presentations and slide shows.  He gave the best talk I’ve ever seen at a conference that time in San Francisco, that’s for sure.  His talk last night was good (though not unproblematic, as I’ll mention in a second), but it wasn’t quite the same as being “right there” in the meat space of that room in Cambridge. Much of it was some of the wonkiness of the technology, and the split between focusing in on Lessig and on his slides.  If I was directing the shoot, I’d say keep the camera on his slides, but of course you do want to actually see the guy too.But beyond that, it was both a live but disembodied and not quite as vivid viewing experience I had quite frankly never experienced before.  it wasn’t quite being there, but it was more interactive than just watching it on TV or watching a recording.  I’ve never gambled in the “sports book” section of a casino or at an off-track betting site, but I suspect that’s a similar kind of viewing and interaction experience.
• It was a pretty darn good speech, but it wasn’t his greatest.  He started off with a discussion of cigarettes, cell phones, wifi, and cancer, particularly this GQ article, and the possibility that we may very well be in the place with cell phones and wifi right now that we were in back in the late 50s/early 60s with cigarettes, a place where people didn’t realize the dangers.  Compelling, but he just kind of drops it after he brings it up.  And really, as I think was clear in his speech where he basically interrupts it with a fairly long section about the importance of fixing the things wrong with Congress, I don’t think Lessig’s heart is completely there with the issue of copyright reform.  He said as much a few years ago, that he was more or less “done” with this copyright stuff and he was now moving on to institutional corruption generally and fixing Congress in particular.In a way, Lessig is a victim of his success, not unlike a whole bunch of writers and artists, notably musical acts like the Rolling Stones, Ringo and Paul McCartney, the Who, and Led Zeppelin.  The Rolling Stones and the Who (well, the two remaining ones) are still out there performing, but are they even bothering to write and record new albums?  Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney are still coming out with new material, but honestly, does anyone care about hearing them do anything other than the music that made them famous in their 20s?  This is apparently why Robert Plant has refused to reunite with John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page to restart Led Zeppelin:  no one would care about anything new they do, so what’s the point?So while Lessig did his copyright and remix spiel and he patiently and carefully answered questions asked from around the world for a good 45 minutes after he talked for almost 45 minutes, I don’t think his heart was really in it.  Until the last question, actually:  someone asked something along the lines of “what is blowing your mind right now.”  Lessig lit up and spoke enthusiastically about his concern about the recent Supreme Court case for Citizens United and also for his Fix Congress First work.
• There are some conflicts and inconsistencies with Lessig’s call for open computing and remix culture that I guess I kind of knew about before but which I thought were really visible Thursday.  Remix culture is important and ought to be fostered in all kinds of ways– by the way, I stumbled across this cool book/project that’s available as a book and as a downloadable PDF, Remix:  Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. But as Derek and one of my grad students talked about after this at The Corner, the examples of remix “art” and “culture” are always a little thin.  The example Lessig had in his talk was of a series of live “remixes” of sorts of someone’s effort to remix a Breakfast Club mashup. I was reminded of the remix after remix of the Hitler meme.  This is all interesting and such, but… well, how much of it is “art?”  Remixing is a valuable and useful creative activity, especially for amateurs and fans and academics (I am all three at times), but it’s not quite the same as “creativity” or “art” exactly, is it?And as for Apple:  on the one hand, I completely agree with all the critiques about their rigid controls over devices via the Apple Store, about their secrecy, their reluctance to “open it up” even a little, etc.  On the other hand, I think every person they showed in the crowd at Cambridge (including Lessig) had an Apple laptop of some flavor, and Lessig himself confessed his love of all devices Apple.  Me too, and at least two of the reasons why I am such an Apple devotee is the integrated “look and feel” of nearly every piece of software and hardware, and the fact that Apple stuff “just works.”  There might be better phones than the iPhone out there, but since I have an Apple computer and all I need to do to get the iPhone to work on it is plug it in, why would I possibly bother experimenting with anything else?But of course, this beautiful integration, simplicity, and reliability of the software and hardware is a result of a closed system.  Proprietary-based Windoze inconsistencies between software and hardware are bad enough; open source/”free” software for these systems are often a hit and miss proposition.  Sure, you can get it to work and you can feel virtuous and smug about running all open source software on the PC you cobbled together with parts you salvaged, but that’s a pain in the ass.  It’s a heck of a lot easier and more elegant (albeit more expensive) to embrace the warm and glowing Apple logo.