Library in a 1:1 World
Life in Laptop Land
When I am not at school, and this time of year it seems I’m always at school– I love to go home and vanish into my sewing room. There I am surrounded by color and fabric and I can play to my heart’s content. My other favorite thing to do is vanish into a book. With ebooks I can combine both passions. Ah bliss.
I use audio books from the Alameda County Library ebook and audio book collection. There is a catch in that I need to use my PC laptop at home to download. The good news is that they have switched their provider of audiobooks from Overdrive to NetLibrary and now about 50% of the titles can be downloaded to ipods. I have an aversion to ear buds or earphones, so I just use my laptop.
I could spend a lot of time at the NPR Podcast Directory, browsing and listening to book reviews, This American Life , and those Driveway Moments stories. The voices from Youth Radio can sometimes be the most arresting, as in this commentary by Derek Williams Becoming a Nerd
I think we have a number of students who face this delimma when they come to Moreau and their friends go to a local school.
While movie trailers, incredibly bad singers, and animals engaged in unnatural tasks (like playing the Piano) may be the choice of many YouTube devotees, it is also an incredible educational resource. The range of topics available to the learner is amazing, from the idea rich TED talks to how to do almost anything. It’s a feast for the visual learner from bricklaying and bread making to quadratic equations it’s all there. You can even see a few seconds of me out on the water in a tiny boat in this video.
I love LibraryThing and Shelfari, another social library site. There is a LibraryThing widget that I have used to show recent acquisitions to the library, and it’s easy to link to your collection. I think LibraryThing is a combination of Facebook and NetFlicks. It’s possible to waste a lot of time in these Elysian Fields.
|
I had some trouble with publishing this document to my blog, and discovered that I couldn’t change the text color without stripping the formatting. That does not work too well with a poem. Anyway you can still sort of read it, so here for Spring and in honor of A Poem in your Pocket Day held on April 30th The Hand By Mary Ruefle The teacher asks a question.
You know the answer, you suspect
you are the only one in the classroom
who knows the answer, because the person
in question is yourself, and on that
you are the greatest living authority,
but you don’t raise your hand.
You raise the top of your desk
and take out an apple.
You look out the window.
You don’t raise your hand and there is
some essential beauty in your fingers,
which aren’t even drumming, but lie
flat and peaceful.
The teacher repeats the question.
Outside the window, on an overhanging branch,
a robin is ruffling its feathers
and spring is in the air.
|
||
As you reach #18, I hope you all wish to join our learning wiki–MCHS Learning.
Please add department specific items to your Dept. page and let me know about anything you would like added to the Web 2.0 tools categories. The You Tube Periodic Table of Videos is an example of a department specific resource. We plan on keeping the MCHS wiki up and watching it grow.
Copyright is a very complex topic, but in an era of self produced works, it’s vital that students understand the concepts of intellectual property, fair use and the public domain.
All US copyright law flows from Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the US Constitution. Looking carefully at the language it becomes clear that the intent of the framers was to promote the proliferation of knowledge.
This clause allows for the securing of rights for a limited time to ” promote the progress of science and the useful arts”.
The legal provision of Fair Use has evolved over years and can be applied when copyright law conflicts with the public good. Fair Use attempts to balance the rights of the copyright holder with those of the public. There have been a number of important revisions to copyright law in recent years, notably the Copyright Extension Act. There is a four way test to determine Fair Use.
1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes.
2. The nature of the copyrighted work.
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole.
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
All 4 factors are not weighted equally, but all must be considered.
There are no hard and fast rules to determine Fair Use. Various stakeholders have issued guidelines but they are not legally binding. There was a Conference on Fair Use (CONFU) , called by President Clinton in 1993 to address the issue of Fair Use. The conference issued guidelines which are often cited for by libraries and educators. These are the ones that say how much of a work you can make multiple copies of for class use. The CONFU guidelines (with the exceptions of those for educational use of multimedia) were actually not signed off on by the participants at the conference. It is more important to consider intent when determining fair use. Chances are if you are duplicating a work to avoid spending money, you are in copyright violation. The School of Communication at American University has issued a publication, The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education , which tries to guide educators in response to specific recurrent situtations rather than lists of limitations.
The law around copyright is anything but clear, and has become even more complex with the burgeoning of self-publishing and new media formats.
As an example of just how confusing things can get check out these steps from Stanford Libraries, Copyright and Fair Use for determining if a work is under copyright or in the public domain
To determine whether a work is in the public domain and available for use without the author’s permission, you first have to find out when it was published. Then apply the following rules to see if the copyright has expired:
All works published in the United States before 1923 are in the public domain.
Works published after 1922, but before 1978 are protected for 95 years from the date of publication. If the work was created, but not published, before 1978, the copyright lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years. However, even if the author died over 70 years ago, the copyright in an unpublished work lasts until December 31, 2002.
For works published after 1977, the copyright lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years. However, if the work is a work for hire (that is, the work is done in the course of employment or has been specifically commissioned) or is published anonymously or under a pseudonym, the copyright lasts between 95 and 120 years, depending on the date the work is published.
Lastly, if the work was published between 1923 and 1963, you must check with the U.S. Copyright Office to see whether the copyright was properly renewed. If the author failed to renew the copyright, the work has fallen into the public domain and you may use it.
Simple huh! If you really need to know the Copyright Office will check on copyright status for the rate of $150 an hour.
So what do our students need to know? Students need to understand not only about illegal downloading of entertainment but also about copyright law in general and their rights under Fair Use as students. They need to understand that in most cases content creation automatically confers copyright protection on the creator or author. Students also need to know that they can share their work while retaining some rights such as attribution through Creative Commons licensing.
Oh this is SO being dropped from any 23 Things we do in the future. I think Technorati was the one “thing” that confused people the most. Google blog search would suffice and create less trauma. It is something people should be aware exisits as it a major force in the “blogosphere”, especially it’s ranking system. If you are a big time blogger your Technorati stats may be very important to you–but that’s not anything we have to worry about.
I love Diigo and have been using it all year. I like that I can make lists of bookmarks and that it suggests tags. Mea culpa… I’m a terrible tagger, which is a horrible thing to admit as a librarian. Diigo responds to my very visual learning stlye. My Diigo profile is here. Could anyone have a dorkier avatar ? 
I love Twitter. It’s a bit hard to explain to folks who don’t use it. It’s basically micro blogging with a 140 character limit. It’s easy to make fun of as in the recent Doonesbury cartoon featuring the twittering news anchor. It depends on your network how useful it can be. My network is all very academic and also amazing.
My lastest tip from Twitter is Academic Earth which is described as Hulu for academic course content. You can read about it in this blog post from Tech Crunch. It aggregates all the online course video. Hulu gathers and stores commercial video content–like your favorite TV shows.
