Author: Steve Krause

I had an annoying conversation with someone at EMU today (who will remain unnamed because I am polite and also because I don’t remember his name) about the concept of “fair use” as it pertains to copyright. I’ll spare the details here, but this colleague was convinced that I was most certainly breaking the law with my use of EMU’s e-reserves system and the reason why I wasn’t being sued over this was because I was “small potatoes,” or some such thing. He said this to me several times.

I don’t think that this colleague had any unique wisdom regarding copyright and fair use; his main qualifications for making such a pronouncement seemed to be that he was much older and taller than me.

In any event, I came home and did a little bit of basic web research and I learned two basic things. First, it seems that the rules for fair use as they apply to e-reserves kind of depends on who you want to believe. For example, this press release from the Association of American Publishers suggests that materials in e-reserves have to be cleared in the same fashion as materials that appear in printed course packets. I was under the impression that one of the main reasons why the coursepack people had to go through this was because they made money from them. Regardless, this kind of “hardline stance” isn’t surprising, given the nature of the organization.

On the other hand, The American Library Association Statement on Fair Use and Electronic Reserves is pretty open-minded and flexible about fair use as it applies to e-reserves. Again, probably not surprising. I think one of the most interesting passages is the “Summary” that appears in the last paragraph:

While there is no guarantee that a practice or combination of practices is fair use, such certainty is not required to safely implement e-reserves. The law builds in tolerance for risk-taking. At one end of the continuum are combinations of practices with which individuals and institutions tolerant of some risk will be comfortable. On the other end are combinations of practices with which those who are averse to risk will be more comfortable. Each institution’s combination of practices reflects its tolerance for risk against the background of prevailing beliefs about fair use. Understandably, “not knowing” makes many people uncomfortable, so Congress explicitly addressed this aspect of fair use. Section 504(c)(2) of the Copyright Act provides special protection to nonprofit libraries, educational institutions and their employees. When we act in good faith, reasonably believing that our actions are fair use, in the unlikely event we are actually sued over a use, we will not have to pay statutory damages even if a court finds that we were wrong. This demonstrates Congressional acknowledgement of the importance of fair use and the importance of our using it!

I’m reading this as meaning that as long as I’m not trying to violate copyright laws and my intentions are educational, I’ll be fine, as will everyone else at EMU who are acting in good faith. In other words, my taller/senior colleague ought to not worry.

However (and this is my second learned idea of the day), I do think that my review of the “rules” of fair use make me realize that I need to maintain and/or “close off” my e-reserve sites at the end of semesters and not just leave that stuff up there all the time. I’m not entirely sure why this is the case, but part of fair use seems to require me to occasionally take things off of the site. It doesn’t say exactly how long I have to do that, but since I won’t be needing these things this summer, I’d say that will probably be long enough.

This is what I’ve been doing off and on this afternoon instead of what I’m supposed to be doing.

This is at the South Park Studio site. Pretty fun stuff.

Okay, I’m going back to work now. I promise.

I just got an email via tech-rhet about the Computers and Writing Conference, which is going to be at Stanford Univesity this year. To be honest, I haven’t heard much about this year’s conference, though I haven’t been paying that much attention, either.

Don’t get me wrong– C&W is always a great conference, and while I’ve heard some grumblings about the way things have been organized (or not), I’m sure that it will be a fine time for one and all once things get underway in mid-June. But I’m not going this year simply because of location. I went to the CCCCs in San Francisco this year, and while that was a surprisingly inexpensive trip for me, I decided I can’t really afford to go to two conferences way out on the west coast in one year. I suppose there are people out west who feel the same way about coming east.

Hopefully, many of the usual suspects will be out there and blogging about various events. And I will be attending next year when it will be (in all places!) Lubbock, Texas. I’m looking forward to visiting Texas Tech, though I am so not looking forward to going to Lubbock– no offense to, ah, Lubbockers? Lubbockities? Lubs? Anyway, I’ll be going to next year’s C&W because a) I’m not going to this year’s C&W, and b) the other conference I’ll be going to this coming year, the CCCCs, is an easy four hour drive from here in Chicago. I was going to say “c) I can drive to Lubbock,” but Mapquest tells me it’s around 1400 miles from Ypsilanti. Hmmm….

One thing I am becoming increasingly convinced about: blogging doesn’t work that well as a teaching tool.

No, scratch that–

I haven’t figure out how to use blogging effectively in my own teaching. At least not quite yet.
I’m working on an essay that will hopefully come out soon that makes part of this argument, and I made another part of this argument in an essay that came out in Kairos last Fall called “When Blogging Goes Bad.” But basically, I just haven’t had that much luck in using blogs in my teaching, especially as a way of facilitating conversation among students in class. I think emailing lists do a much MUCH better job of fostering interaction and discussion, especially as it pertains to readings and class activities. Now, some of that has to do with the way that I’ve used emailing lists in the past and the sort of presumptions I have about what counts as “interaction.” I mean, just because my students post a lot of message on email doesn’t necessarily mean they “interact” more than they do on a blog.

Anyway, my efforts at using a blog collaboratively this semester was in my Writing for the World Wide Web class. Here’s a link to the class blog (which I’ll probably delete soon, btw). I thought it went okay– better than some collaborative experiences I’ve had before, not as well as I hoped (though again, maybe expectations were too high).

One thing that did work reasonably well were the student blogs in my tiny graduate course, Writing Research Theory and Practice. Students kept individual blogs about their “adventures” on the research trail, and while not all students were as diligent with their posting as I would have preferred, I wasn’t as diligent as making use of the blogs in my teaching as I would have preferred. It’s been a crazy semester. See yesterday’s post.

Anyway, I do think this use of blogs– individual student research journals– has some potential. I’m scheduled to teach a section of first year writing in spring term (which actually starts the first week of May), and I think I might try to incorporate an assignment like this into the class. I’ll probably be a bit more specific about what and when I want students to write, and I think I’ll build an “interactive” component into the assignment by requiring students to post comments and/or links to each others’ blogs. We’ll see how it turns out.

But regardless, I really REALLY missed having a class emailing list for these two classes this semester. Besides a lack of interaction (or at least my own perceived version of interaction), it just was kind of hard to get a hold of students on short notice. And there were a couple times this semester where I needed to get a hold of folks in these classes (and btw, these two classes only meet once a week) to inform them of important schedule changes and such. A crazy semester, like I said. See yesterday.

I could (and did) post schedule updates on web sites or blogs, but I wasn’t always confident that students got the information. With an emailing list, I felt a lot more confident (even positive?) that students knew what was going on because 9 out of 10 of my students check their email every day, or at least in a timely fashion before the class meets.

I’m thinking about some ways I can use blogs and other blog-like tools for an online class I’m teaching in the fall, but that’s another story. More end thoughts later.

Outside of the EMU Halle library today, I saw a young woman standing outside. Under a jacket, I saw she was wearing a T-shirt that said “Kiss Me– I’m Vegan.” Then she reached into her jacket, pulled out and then lit a cigarette.

This semester’s classes end April 19 (finals end April 26), and I am limping to the end. It has been an absolute crazy semester for me. Among other things:

• I taught two courses completely new to me (English 323 and English 621) and one class more or less new since I changed most of the way I did things (English 444). I haven’t had that kind of “prep” load since I started down the tenure-track in 1996.
• I taught two night classes, which I think is draining on me. I don’t know how students who put themselves through school by working all day and taking courses three or so nights a week do it.
• My wife and I were involved in a very stressful job search that involved many MANY twists and turns. I am happy to say though that EMU has offered my wife a tenure-track position and so we’re going to be staying here for quite a while.
• I did an unusual amount of travel because of the job search, the CCCCs, some family issues, etc., which meant I had to cancel an unusual number of classes.
• There was a bunch of other stuff in my own “unofficial life” (eg, we were living with one car for most of the semester) that made my official life a lot more complicated.
• Oh yeah– I’ve got a ton of scholarly projects I’ve been neglecting, etc. I literally just now remembered something I promised to do by the past weekend. Shoot.

In some ways, one could say “thus is the academic life,” but it has been a bit more stressful than usual this semester. All of this is a preamble of sorts to react to Michael Arnzen’s “Ambush the White Rabbit” in Inside Higher Ed. On his own personal blog, Michael points out he means this piece as a sort of “self-mocking rant,” though some of the comments left by others on the Inside Higher Ed. piece suggest that people don’t get the joke. Or maybe folks are just a bit on edge.

Anyway, tardiness, especially after everything else going on, doesn’t bother me too much. It doesn’t bother me as much as it used to, I suppose because I have become increasingly tardy in my own life. Why? See above.

What does bother me though is out-and-out absence, mostly of the literal sort (though the student who seems “absent” in a more abstract sense can be problematic, too). Ever since I started teaching college as a graduate student in 1988, I have always had a very straight-forward attendance policy: if you miss too many classes regardless of the reason why you missed the class, your grade would greatly suffer. The details of this has varied from year to year, depending on the course and depending on the school where I was teaching. This semester, I decided to suspend that policy; I merely told students that if they missed too many classes, they probably wouldn’t do that well.

I think I’ll go back to the way I used to do it.

I haven’t had a lot of students just not turning up for class (I’ve been lucky to have 3 pretty good groups of students this semester), but I just sense that the few students I have who have missed a few too many classes probably wouldn’t have done this if my policy was more clear. For one thing, I think a policy that says “if you miss ‘x’ number of classes, your grade will drop by ‘y%'” (or something like that) helps students recognize the implications of missing class. I mean, they know I keep attendance and I know they know exactly how many classes they’ve missed. End of story.

But the other thing I noticed this semester is I don’t know their names as well. It’s not like I have a lot of students, and I do have to cut myself a bit of a break (see above bulleted list), but because I did not keep regular attendance from the beginning of the term, I simply didn’t learn the names of my students as well as I usually do. It makes me feel a bit guilty to be passing back papers at the end of the term and to not quite know who is who.

Anyway, that’s just one crazy thought at the end. More will be coming, probably.

Here’s a kind of interesting site: http://postsecret.blogspot.com/ or “PostSecret.” The idea here is you write a secret on the back of a post card, send them the image, and they post it. Pretty interesting stuff, but my guess is that one “secret” not being talked about here is that at least some of these secrets aren’t really secrets; they look more like little one line poems to me. Still kind of cool.

I’m playing around with the look of the blog, trying to make it look sort of like the new stevendkrause.com site. There’s two thoughts (I guess) and once concern I have about the new look:

• I’m using verdana and georgia as the fonts for this page because (and I didn’t realize this until I read it in a book I’m teaching this semester) these fonts were designed to be particularly readable on the screen.
• I’m going with a pretty simple design with a dark block across the top of the page because in my Writing for the World Wide Web class this semester, my students and I again and again really liked the pages with this sort of big block of a header at the top of the page like this. It just seems to make it more readable.
• My concern is I want to do something with this page to make it distinct form my “official” blog, which I’m also going to redesign soon. I think what I might do is change the grey background to something a bit more colorful; we’ll see.

Anyway, what does my vast audience think?

I just caught the end the Food Network show $40 a Day, an episode specifically about Ashland, OR. Ah, Ashland…

We were out there from 1996 to 1998, and I have to say I had mixed feelings. Quite frankly, I didn’t like my job that much, and while I did like Ashland quite a bit, I did feel like it was kind of in the middle of nowhere. But they did have incredibly good theater and a lot of good restaurants, too. Besides all that, Ashland is where Will was born.

Like I said, I just caught the end of the show, so I’ll have to see it again on one of the days its airing again to see if I recognize any of the places they featured. I’m sure that a lot has changed since we were there. Still, $40 a day or not, I cannot imagine going back to Ashland without a stop at the Black Sheep Pub and Cucina Biazzi, which is one of the most charming Italian restaurants I’ve ever been to.

I believe the Oregon Shakespeare Festival lets eight year old kids into the shows, so maybe we’ll head back next year or the year after. I’m kind of curious to see what’s different and what’s the same after 10 years….

Do you remember that movie Seven, with Kevin Spacey, Brad Pitt, and Morgan Freeman? Here’s the final scene, performed by stuffed animals. Via Johndan’s blog.