Copyright and Fair Use Questions.

Copyright Law Often Made Up as We Go Along. "Copyright law allows for what's called "fair use" of copyrighted material without payment or even consent of the creator. You can, for instance, quote freely from this column in your holiday newsletter without fear that the Tribune will ask the courts to seize rights fees from your wages.

You can make copies of it for a class of students and read extended passages on the radio, all without asking. You can lift portions for parody purposes. You can include it in your personal 'Most Wonderful Columns of All Time' collection and lend it to grateful friends.

But where's the line?"

Eric Zorn's survey is indeed thought-provoking, so I'd suggest going through the questions on your own.

[The Shifted Librarian]

I get asked so often if it's "ok" to use huge chunks of other people's work in an e-Learning app or in an article "if they are given credit for it." I'm glad to see other people apparently get asked the same question. (Hint: if you ask me, as an editor, the answer is always going to be "No" and if you ask me as an e-Learning consultant, the answer is still always going to be "No." The only exception is if you've got permission in writing and possibly a cancelled check in hand to prove that you paid for the privilege. It's business, folks, not Miss Burns' seventh-grade social studies class.)

1:32:33 PM    

Stay out of trouble with the California no-UCE law.

California bans all spam e-mail. California took a tough stand against spam e-mail on Wednesday after Governor Gray Davis signed a law prohibiting anyone from sending unsolicited commercial e-mail advertisements to a California e-mail address. [InfoWorld: Top News]

Read the article. This law requires opt-in and opt-out. Best to be on the safe side and only add someone to your opt-in list if you have documentation: name, email address, IP address at a minimum. Be sure you put an explicit opt-out address at the bottom of each email and attend to your opt-outs on a daily basis if not "as occurring." The reason for this, of course, is that people forget who they opted in with and if the Attorney General comes calling you want to be able to show that you are running right and are not spamming.

I used to send a follow-up email to people who contacted me by phone, but I recently changed my process in anticipation of more of these laws. Now I give them, on the phone, a URL where they can go for details of my offer and where they are invited to opt in. I get the IP addresses out of the log.

If I can get any more details, I will post them here. I am not a lawyer, of course, so you will want to check all of this out with your attorney. Don't rely on my advice -- these are just ideas for you to consider and to get competent counsel on.

8:56:37 PM    

Learn to use your weblog for business.

Weblog Workshop by BloggingWorks. There are still a few spots left for the Friday, October 3rd Chicago workshop. Sign up now! "Business blogs are taking off. Are you up to speed? Learn how your business can harness the power of weblogs to improve communication and efficiency at this hands-on workshop." [xBlog: The visual thinking weblog | XPLANE]

12:53:18 PM    

More on the Eolas v. Microsoft matter and its impact on the Web, e-Learning, and Life As We Know It.

Patents: W3C on amber alert. Yesterday the W3C launched a Patent Advisory Group to "study issues ... raised by the court case of Eolas v. Microsoft." The group's FAQ is most interesting for what it does not say. [Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report]

8:57:47 AM    

Streaming Media Patents Being Enforced.

Patent holder unplugs porn network. A holding company that has a stack of streaming media patents briefly shuts down a network of pornography Web sites in an ominous sign for mainstream providers of streaming Web content. [CNET News.com - Front Door]

Is this really "ominous"? If you read the article, you find that most of the mainstream providers have already bought the requisite licenses. The porn sites were shut down because they wouldn't pay. Seems fair to me. Too bad they couldn't have been shut down forever.

We need to find out exactly who is being required to purchase licenses. A February 14 article in CNET News ("Streaming patent claims go to court") says:

Acacia began its license-seeking process last summer, approaching companies in the adult entertainment business. Since that time it has begun approaching mainstream Webcasters as well, asking for license revenue that ranges between 0.75 percent and 2 percent of companies' revenue related to the streaming business.

So it looks like they are going after the really big outfits in court. Virgin Records and Microsoft, for example. What about the use of streaming media by Joe's Barn Door Company in its Web-based employee training program? or Bill's Streaming Media Service Bureau? Probably we will pay for the right to use the technology when we acquire a license to use specific software. Until we get big enough to show up on the radar in Acacia's Legal Department. I guess that will be a nice problem to have.

A lot has happened in this area in the last year, and these patent suits will continue to shape the future of e-Learning and the ability of entrepreneurs to provide services. Web frames, e-commerce, and JPEG are just three of the basic technologies that are being claimed. Watch for the effect of these on the cost of entry into the e-Learning provider arena. Can "Mom-and-Pop" e-Learning Shops continue to participate, or will this be the catalyst that forces the long-anticipated shakeout of the industry?

9:05:42 PM    

Keeping up with Live Meeting.

Microsoft touts communications services. An executive at the software giant talks up the new Live Meeting Web conferencing service and future technologies aimed at helping office workers share information. [CNET News.com - Front Door]

Still to be seen how useful this will be to those of us who provide services to organizations, and for training. The pricing will be a key element, and it could open up another opportunity: small remote conferencing setups, something like the ones that Kinko's pioneered several years ago.

9:00:05 PM    

Distance Learning: Step by Step.

This (following James Farmers' comments) is my first, fast look reaction to the paper. James' comments first, though, since he pointed the paper out to me.

Step by backwards step.

I just wrote a long critique about this and then IE crashed and now I'm 8 minutes away from a meeting.

Short version: Don't even go near this paper (.pdf)... 'Distance Learning: Step by Step' unless you'd like to get thoroughly disenchanted with the way online education is being put out there... whaddyaupto JITE?

[update: ahha! so that was the link... thanks George]

[James Farmer's Radio Weblog]

I am surprised by the content of the paper. Granted, I do not have a doctorate in Education and all of my experience over the last 35 years has been with adults in workplace settings. My postgraduate work was 30 years ago, and it was in Human Behavior. I admit that the authors have far more in the way of credentials than I do, and they are experts in education. I admit that I have an extreme bias against lecture as a primary and exclusive delivery method. And granted I only spent a few minutes (ok, an hour) reading it, I'm grumpy because I have a muscle in my back that has been in spasm for two weeks and I am distracted by my father's illness and by looming publication deadlines for the Journal and an article that is requiring far too much of my attention to edit. But still ... what ARE these authors saying (and it's Nova Southeast I wonder about, as much as I wonder why JITE published this thing)?

In other words, I am going out on a limb here -- maybe I got the authors' point wrong.

The paper seems to argue that (1) we teach lower level cognitive skills to children and traditional college students, and higher level cognitive skills to adults and graduate students; (2) it is most appropriate to deliver lower level cognitive skills via classroom lecture and to deliver higher level cognitive skills via online means. I can't possibly have understood the paper. The "stepwise" plan looks to me to be far more complicated and rigid than necessary, and it's done from the "teacher" point of view rather than looking at the learning tasks faced by the "student."

My experience suggests that progressions designed for adults must usually address the lower levels in Bloom's Taxonomy as well as the upper levels, and that it works better with adults to use a combination of classroom and online settings to get the job done regardless of the level. In fact, in my opinion, the results are better when you leverage the potential of "live" settings for the higher levels. I wonder, as well, whether children and traditional college students don't also require higher level development as part of their education. Even young children can handle synthesis.

I don't have enough time right now to write a reasoned, thorough response, but I just have grave doubts about this whole "step by step" thing. I think instructional design requires a more holistic approach with respect to objectives and methods, at least in the settings with which I am familiar. More later, when my deadlines are dealt with and I am less worried about my dad.

8:12:56 AM    

Average price per seat of LMS.

Jay Cross' Notes on LMS presentation by Bryan Chapman (from Brandon Hall group).

Jay Cross is blogging the VNU Supplier Summit. There are lots of nuggets in his notes, and of particular interest to me was the session by Bryan Chapman, an LMS analyst with Brandon Hall, who had some numbers associated with average LMS license prices. They seem important enough to be quoted below:

Average price per seat of LMS

	Trainees:	500 users	10000	25000
Licensed	1st year	$83	$22	$17
	3 year license & maintenance	$42	$12	$9
Hosted	1ST year	91	18	13
	3 year	84	16	12

The vendors in the post-secondary CMS world get very upset when their customers start publishing the numbers for their individual license deals, which has made it extremely difficult to get a view of what an average seat is costing across different size license bases. My general impression, though, is that the difference between the post-secondary CMS and corporate LMS license prices is not as big as I had initial thought. - SWL

-via [elearningpost]

[EdTechPost]

5:56:02 PM    

Via Michelle Lamberson comes mention of an important collection of papers on learning objects that came out of the recent OLN Institute at Ohio State called "Building and Assessing Shareable Content." The proceedings for the conference, a book titled "Learning Objects: Contexts and Connections" (Catherine M. Gynn and Stephen R. Acker, Editors) are now available online.

Included in which is a great paper by Michelle and Brian Lamb titled "Course Management Systems: Trapped Content Silos or Sharing Platforms?" While ostensibly the paper addresses the issue about whether current CMSes enable or disable the sharing of content, in my mind the stronger points it ends up making are about the fact that it is likely cultural, not technical, issues that will be a challenge to sharing, and that the definition of 'content' currently in place leaves a lot to be desired. - SWL

- via [Michelle's Online Learning Freakout Party Zone]

[EdTechPost]

"it is likely cultural, not technical, issues that will be a challenge " -- This would only be a surprise to people who have not understood that learning and other human activity do not depend on technology. In fact, technology is more often a hindrance. Got to keep the cart before the horse.

10:48:09 AM