Ars points out that this week’s edition of Science addresses how computer technology is changing the education system. There’s likely nothing too surprising if this is something you follow, but it’s always a good idea to follow the press.
I’m no patent expert, but a not so recent article in the Times (recently highlighted on Slashdot) addresses how “colleges and universities own the ideas and technologies invented by the people who work for them, including professors and graduate students who are paid to do research.” This is a great revenue generator for cash-strapped institutions, but things get complicated when the inventor needs to obtain a license for their own idea, as happened to the student interviewed for the article.
Schools are by definition a place of learning, which is a process of self discovery. What does it mean for a school to own something that comes out of your head while you’re working or attending there? It’s true that these discoveries happen with the aid of school resources, but others might argue that the product of all of a school’s resources is learning (or at least maybe it should be).
Educational technologists have recently worried about student’s owning the copyight to their assignments (which now often appear online)–this is an interesting twist on a similar problem.
I’ll admit that my thoughts on this feel half-baked at the moment.
Along the same lines as my last post, Ars gets into the costs of the RIAA’s proposed “3 strikes” policy. My favorite part:
Jerry Scroggin is the owner of Bayou Internet and Communications(BIC),
a small ISP based in Monroe, Louisiana with around 11,000 small
business, residential, and municipal customers. BIC already receives
notifications from the RIAA each month, and each time”I ask for their
billing address,” Scroggin told CNET. “Usually, I never hear back.”
Techdirt also mentions something that crossed my mind, but didn’t make it into the blog post–taking the fight out of the courts allows the recording industry to sidestep due process. It may make less of a “public statement,” but privately settling these disputes might ensure an outcome that’s more agreeable and perhaps (from their perspective) better than they might have won under the law.
Big news… the RIAA announced that they will no longer persue lawsuits against individual music filesharers. Instead, filesharers will receive a notification from the Internet Service Provider (ISP), and may loose net access after 3 “strikes.” ISPs should be cautious, for this could set a bad precedent.
The safe harbor provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was granted to ISPs because it allowed them to effectively turn a blind eye to the vast amount of content flowing over their network. If a copyright holder sends them a notice of something infringing, they take the offending content down. The theory is that ISPs shouldn’t be put in a position of policing content because it would be a huge burden. I would argue that this will require a great investment of man/lawyer hours (though a PK blogger argues that this would take care of ISP’s “bandwidth hog” problem and others may argue that people are a more sustainable investment than hardware). Further, if ISPs are seen as colluding with the recording industry, it might tarnish their image.
A better answer would be a unified “ISP ethic,” perhaps like librarians, to gain public trust. The 3 strike rule might make them into an RIAA-style bad guy, and the costs of such a plan may mean they won’t be able to cut prices or increase service.
After a brief hiatus from blogging, I think a good way to get back into the swing of things might be again asking “why I blog,” with the help of a piece from The Atlantic that resonated with me and even challenged me.
On the subject of tone, Andrew Sullivan (the author) remarks:
For bloggers, the deadline is always now. Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.
I agree with this completely–and think it’s one of the most misunderstood aspects of blogging (hence my blog’s name). An understanding that there will be mistakes and times when you’ll change your mind are an important part of the medium.
The blog remained a superficial medium, of course. By superficial, I mean simply that blogging rewards brevity and immediacy. … the key to understanding a blog is to realize that it’s a broadcast, not a publication. If it stops moving, it dies. If it stops paddling, it sinks.
D’oh! Tough words for the occasional blogger. The funny thing is, during the break I accumulated a list of things I want to blog about, but never did. To me, it’s less important to consistently update–I’d rather sacrifice a few readers than miss the opportunity to respond in a way that’s at least somewhat thought out.
Sullivan goes on to describe bloggers of history, including one I’m not familar with: Montaigne.
Montaigne was living his skepticism, daring to show how a writer evolves, changes his mind, learns new things, shifts perspectives, grows older—and that this, far from being something that needs to be hidden behind a veneer of unchanging authority, can become a virtue, a new way of looking at the pretensions of authorship and text and truth. … To blog is therefore to let go of your writing in a way, to hold it at arm’s length, open it to scrutiny, allow it to float in the ether for a while, and to let others, as Montaigne did, pivot you toward relative truth.
Again, Sullivan captures the spirit of a blog so well with this historical analogue. The personality of a bloggers thought and, well, personality are what gives the medium this facinating balance between intimacy and publicity, or between the surface and depth of our thoughts and feelings. Finally:
If all this sounds postmodern, that’s because it is. And blogging suffers from the same flaws as postmodernism: a failure to provide stable truth or a permanent perspective. A traditional writer is valued by readers precisely because they trust him to have thought long and hard about a subject, given it time to evolve in his head, and composed a piece of writing that is worth their time to read at length and to ponder. Bloggers don’t do this and cannot do this—and that limits them far more than it does traditional long-form writing.
I’ll admit to being a postmoderist, and if it takes one to know one, I think I can say that Sullivan is right to call blogging a largely postmodern exercise. Where I think he’s completely wrong is that blogging can’t be well thought out. Academic bloggers must walk a fine line between shooting from the hip and providing reasoned analysis. Some think on their feet quite well, and these become the more prolific academic bloggers. Personally, I need at least a little time to digest. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a blogging style that consciously tries to balance these issues of timeliness, reason, and personality. If Sullivan were to really take a postmodern approach to blogging, there would be nothing a blogger ‘could not do,’ because it’s such a personal exercise.
