Category: Technology

Do you own the e-mail you send?

A Times columnist looks at the question of if you can be sure that an e-mail you send gets received. Turns out dropped messages are possible, but that a company called ReadNotify is attempting to make this a thing of the past. Along with receipt notification, the company will offer a “self destruct” feature which will prohibit copy/pasting and will delete itself after a specified time.

Some experts have questioned whether such technology is legal under American law, but Mr. Drake says “e-mail tracking is legal because e-mail is ‘owned’ by the author.”

Naturally, laws are open to interpretation, but I think this reading of copyright is in error. Yes, when you write an e-mail it becomes “fixed” and you own the exclusive right to do publish or distribute it (among other things).  But note this is different from owning the e-mail. Once it is sent (distributed) one would naturally expect that you lose control over the message. There may be a license and Digital Rights Management that can give you greater control, but these happen because of an agreement–not because you still own the artifact you somehow disseminated on the Internet.

Digital musicals

David Pogue writes about digital musical orchestras this week.

I mean, a digital accompaniment can certainly boost a production’s professionalism, especially when the only alternative is some beleaguered piano player stumbling through the songs, or a middle-school band honking, out of tune, through a score.

But my own musical career began as precisely that overwhelmed piano player, and, later, precisely that amateur orchestra member. And I knew that every professional musician was once, at some distant past age, a squeaky, honky amateur.

He goes on to describe how this moved him towards MIDI to fill in gaps or even to take the place of a whole orchestra.

Playing in a pit orchestra is without a doubt one of the funnest experiences of my life, and I can’t imagine technology completely taking the place of the amateurs (for community shows at least). Despite squeaks and honks, live musicians will bring a quality of sound that won’t be replaced for some time. I’m reminded of a ballet I saw with canned music.  Every jump -SMACK- thudded on the stage. A real orchestra would have covered that up.

Gaming civics – (almost) a Madison connection

I was preparing to teach next week’s “Quizzing and Gradebook” workshops on our course managment system, Learn@UW. Being a law geek, I thought a short quiz on civics would be an easy way to show off all of the quiz question types–until I saw this:

“Only one-third of Americans can name the three branches of government,” [Justice Sandra Day] O’Connor said, “but two-thirds can name a judge on American Idol.”

Hopefully my quiz won’t be too difficult for the participants, but the surprise in this story is the Madison connection.  Justice O’Connor is heading a project to develop a game called “Our Courts” to help seventh and eight graders learn about our judicial system, and she tapped Madison’s own James Gee (formerly of UW-Madison) to do it.

The game “lets students engage in real issues and real problems,” O’Connor said. It will allow them to “step into the shoes of a judge, a legislator, an executive — teach them how to think through and analyze problems, take action and voice opinions to their elected representatives.”

An early exercise in the game will likely deal with educating students about their First Amendment rights, using examples like Tinker v. Des Moines and the “Bong Hits For Jesus” case.

I love it! Having students step into existing problems is the best way to learn how the courts work–it’s exactly what we do in Intro to Mass Communication Law courses. Maybe the students who have played this game will do better on our hypothetical questions 🙂

Edupunk!

“Edupunk” sounds kind of like the kind of term an instructor might come up with to make their job feel that-much-cooler, but recent stories show the “concept of Edupunk has totally caught wind, spreading through the blogosphere like wildfire.”

If I am reading the (very little) information correctly, there’s an unresolved problem (beyond capitalist co-optation) pushing this movement: commercial educational technology software simply cannot hope to keep up with the pace of innovation.  Commercial educational software lately seems like a poor ripoff of successful online technologies.

The rip-mix punk spirit, to me, is embodied by the instructor who will seek the combination tools that will best meet the needs of their students.  Perhaps taking a rif from a commercial Google product with a strong open source Moodle backbeat will help students meet the objectives of a given course.  This scenario doesn’t necessarily have to be against the mainstream…

The most important thing would be to foster this educational and technological creativity.

Edit: I never said whether I saw myself as “edupunk.” I’m drawn to tinkering, which may bring me to some punk tools, but as a geek and a violinist, it’s hard to call myself “punk” anything.