Monthly Archive for March, 2009

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Dreamweaver is dying

Published on March 7, 2009 in Mass Communication Law. 1 Comment

I’m sorry but Dreamweaver is dying | PC Pro blog

I don’t believe I’ve spent any digital ink talking about my latest tech endeavor–Drupal. CMSes have been an interest of mine for some time, both technically (there’s a lot of buttons to play with) and academically (the ease and flexibility they offer for personal publishing is socially significant). I have been a Dreamweaver user for years, and have taught a few people to use it as well, yet I have found myself less likely to use it in a given day because of CMS development. As a department, I think we are also moving away from teaching this as a viable program for the typical (personal or course) webpage creator. The article cited above hits this nail squarely on the head.

The bottom line is that the old model of the central webmaster hand-spinning every page of every website and, worse, manually adding the navigation necessary to help users find it, just isn’t scalable or viable. The only feasible course for the future is for content to be posted by the content contributor, whether that’s the site owner or site visitors, and for the best possible navigation to be constructed around that content on the fly.

Creating Media as Learning

Published on March 2, 2009 in Education, Technology and Video. 0 Comments

Creating Media as Learning: The Charms and Challenges of Digital Media-Based Assessment

I just listened in on an ELI seminar on assigning and assessing student media projects.  The content here was informative (better than many of the seminars I’ve attended), but the real story was going on in the chat during the session. A vibrant dialogue of questions and resource sharing emerged with posts from across the country. Clearly this is a topic that educational technolgists find engaging (I would guess both pedagogically and technically) — if we could find some way to keep this momentum, we might quickly identify solutions that could have broad application. I’m guessing Educause has a mechanism for this, but being new at my job, I’m not aware of it.

Struggling with centrally-offered tools

Published on March 2, 2009 in Education and Technology. 0 Comments

BohrerED – notes about academic technology: Struggling with centrally-offered tools

One of my colleagues provided a great commentary on the state of university-sponsored technologies (yes, I am the colleague he mentions).  In a nutshell, he proposes:

The centrally-available tools above do have their strengths and have been enlisted to meet certain needs of the past.
…
However, as soon as I began thinking about what the students really need, I became rather disheartened. … Students need to be able to share resources they discovered with others. Students need to be able to show their finished product to each other and to future or current employers not associated with UW.

Others have addressed the general inability of universities to keep up with modern online tools, and I fully attribute this to that phenomenon. However, it’s not a bad thing and it is certainly not that we’ve “fallen behind.” When the internet was relatively new and untested, educational institutions rightly provided the up front research and development needed to test the waters of this new medium. Now that its commercial value has been proven, there is no possible way for any university to compete with the vast amounts of capital business is putting into developing these tools.

Scratch that–I can think of two possible ways (note… as with everything else on this blog, this is my own opinion and does not reflect that of my employer):

  1. Join ‘em: by licensing with the companies that provide these tools any university can catch up in a hurry. The problems with this approach are the potential costs (especially when the number of online tools that could be useful for instruction), and potential problems with student privacy law (see previous posts).
  2. Join up!: by using open source tools in collaborating with other institutions, it’s possible that we could create our own, custom-made tools. This would likely be one step behind the commercial tools, but hopefully not far — as long as universities play nice and contribute back to projects.

Thanks to Jeff for starting an interesting (and necessary) thread.

Two sites of the same IP coin

Published on March 2, 2009 in Copyright, Journalism and Mass Communication Law. 0 Comments

The contrast between two IP articles in today’s Times was striking:

Copyright Challenge for Sites That Excerpt

The Journal, had not given the blog permission to use the column. The excerpt was published with the assumption that it would be permitted under the “fair use” statute of copyright law. Generally, the excerpts have been considered legal, and for years they have been welcomed by major media companies, which were happy to receive links and pass-along traffic from the swarm of Web sites that regurgitate their news and information.

Facing Counterfeiting Crackdown, Beijing Vendors Fight Back

So when the market managers temporarily shut down 29 stalls [selling counterfeit merchandise] over the past month for selling counterfeit goods, no one expected the merchants to acquiesce quietly to the loss of business. … The vendors have responded with the same ferocity with which they nail down a sale. Dozens of them have staged weekly protests against IntellecPro lawyers who are pursuing the trademark case, mocking them as bourgeois puppets of foreigners. The vendors confronted witnesses who provided evidence of trademark violations and filed a countersuit asserting that only the government can shutter a business.

The social process of blogging that has emerged over the years relies on limited quoting to dialogue online. One might say that this has always been done to some degree in RL interactions. When law tries to change a social practice like this that has gone unchecked for an extended period of time, outcomes the Chinese merchants’ response shouldn’t be surprising.