The University of Cape Town has, fittingly, become the first university to sign the Cape Town Open Education Declaration. Here’s to hoping that more universities will follow suit! More info on the Cape Town Open Education Declaration is available.
Monthly Archive for April, 2008
Page 2 of 3
Flat World Knowledge, the start-up company I am involved with, is officially out in the open now. We were featured on NPR’s Marketplace this evening. Program audio is also available.
Flat World Knowledge is a company dedicated to open textbooks. The videos on the website tell the story really well. I look forward to your feedback on what we’re doing!
UPDATE: Also see the Professors Gone Paperless article at Inside Higher Ed, and 1,000 Professors Sign Statement for Affordable Textbooks at Make Textbooks Affordable.
A few updates on my post from yesterday…
Gavin provides his personal experience with the professor in question, including news that “the professor is not a plaintiff but says he supports the suit.” He links to a cartoon in the student paper, and provides this invitation in his comment:
David, I think you and I should take a world tour, to bash academics in the head with frying pans until they understand this point.
Gavin, I’ll provide the frying pans. Just call.
Mr. Sullivan (the lawyer in the suit) commented on the post, upset that I “declined to provide” a link to the Complaint. Well, here’s a link to the company’s own page dedicated to the lawsuit, including links to the Complaint and all the other information they think you deserve to know.
The site is – incredibly – called the Future of Higher Ed. Heaven help us if publishers suing people is the future of higher education in this country. The page includes this awesome quote:
Professor Moulton has published successfully through Faulkner Press for several years, and in this lawsuit Faulkner Press is proud to protect the rights of Professor Moulton and the rights of all professors.
It’s so hypocritical it makes me want to throw up. Paragraph 22 of the Complaint filed by Faulkner says clearly that “Professor Moulton has transferred his copyrights in the lecture to Faulkner Press.” P 26 says he has transferred rights in his textbooks to Faulkner Press and P 33 says he has transferred the rights to his film study questions to Faulkner Press. “Oh, we’re standing up for the rights of professors everywhere” Faulkner says, when in their own Complaint they state that Moulton doesn’t own the rights to his own work. Faulkner Press does.
So what is this lawsuit about? P 66 of the Complaint is crystal clear:
The conduct Defendants described in this Complaint is causing and, unless enjoined and restrained by this Court, will continue to cause FAULKNER PRESS great and irreparable injury that cannot fully be compensated or measured in money.
The suit is, of course, about Faulkner’s ability to make money from Moulton’s work. More of the same from academic publishers. They expect faculty to come up with the ideas, to find the funding to do the research, to carry out the research, to write up the results of research, and then sign over all the copyrights in the results to them. This case is only slightly different; Moulton created a variety of (we assume high quality) teaching materials, and then Faulkner somehow snookers him into signing over all the copyrights in his work to them. So that Faulkner can sue people and say “we nobly defend the rights of professors.” Nope – thanks to you, the professor has no more copyrights in his work. Shame, shame, shame.
Keith Dungan of Faulkner Press emailed me saying:
I just wanted you to be aware of what these professors are having to deal with.
http://www.howigotana.com/
http://www.tutoringzone.com/defaultuf.asp
These are undergrads “reteaching” to the test, with no QA.
I responded, in part:
You say that faculty have to “deal with” this, but study groups of all sorts who share notes and tutor and teach each other without QA are a great tradition at universities; for some of my classes as an undergrad these groups were important to my succeeding in the class. As a professor now, I strongly encourage my students to participate in these types of groups and find and share extra resources to help them learn. If these groups or services help them understand concepts that they just “can’t get” from me and my materials, I’m happy.
And since when do professors have any QA of their teaching materials? They’re experts in their fields; they don’t necessarily know anything about pedagogy. Complaining about a lack of QA is something students wish you would do with regard to most professors, not these services.
Finally, in his comment on my previous post, the lawyer Mr. Sullivan said:
I’m not familiar with your views on IP in general, but if you hold that a professor’s lecture is in the public domain, such that any third party may make as much money on that IP as the market will yield, then we disagree.
Yes, Mr. Sullivan, we disagree. I agree that as US copyright law stands (since the US bowed down to Berne) a professor’s lectures are automatically copyrighted to the full extent of the law. Where we disagree is that I think professors have a moral obligation to license those materials to students and the public under an open license like the Creative Commons Attribution license, ESPECIALLY at a public institution like Florida where public tax monies pay the professors’ salaries. Those materials should belong to the public who paid for them. The NIH recently figured this out for publicly funded research; public institutions of higher education should follow their example with even stronger policy.
I suppose if faculty deliberately choose to misunderstand their role and torment students, they’re free to do so. As Wired reports, another faculty member is claiming that notes students take in his class infringe his intellectual property rights. Michael Moulton, pictured right, and his publisher Faulkner Press (no link love for you!) are asserting what they suppose to be their right to control what students do with the information he teaches in his classes. While this all seems very confusing, the lawyer representing his publisher (a Mr. Sullivan) makes it quite clear:
But if a professor’s lectures are copyrighted, aren’t students already infringing just by taking the notes in the first place?
Yes, Sullivan answers, student notes do infringe, but they are protected infringement.
Ever wonder why students hate teachers? Try telling your students that their class notes infringe your copyright.
We may assume that Prof. Moulton’s / Faulkner Press’s understanding of fair use, or “protected infringement,” is restricted to educational circumstances. The use of student notes from his class for profit-making purposes is all that bothers them. And surely that’s appropriate, right?
Then, once students graduate and go on to employment, what should happen to these class notes whose infringement was once protected? When students take these infringing notes out of the educational setting and into the workplace with them for “review,” surely the protection those dastardly, infringing notes enjoyed in the dorm room finally disappears, doesn’t it? If a graduate is hired by a company, and course-related information makes it’s way into the corporation, that organization might financially benefit from the professor’s intellectual property – without the professor’s or publisher’s permission and without the professor or publisher receiving any compensation! Oh, the humanity! This growing crisis in the academy leads me to ask:
What can be done about the slow, leaking escape of faculty knowledge out of universities via graduating students?
In other words, how can we isolate and contain faculty intellectual property, so that enough students pass exams that our departments maintain their accreditations, but we guarantee that students leave with no more information or expertise than they entered with?
Oh, wait. THAT’S THE WHOLE FREAKING POINT OF THE UNIVERSITY.
The teaching act is a sharing act. I’ll say it again. The teaching act is a sharing act. To hold the sacred title of “faculty” means to be a person who dedicates his or her life to making sure that every student you come in contact with takes with them as much of your knowledge, skills, expertise, and positive attitudes as possible when they graduate. It means to work to facilitate and mediate student learning. It means to enculturate those students as deeply into your professional community and practice as possible. There is simply NO place for selfishness, for withholding, for secrecy, or especially for threats of legal action against students for taking, sharing, or even – gasp – selling – class notes. If it helps students learn what you’re tying to teach, why would you interfere???
The only answer can be that student learning is no longer your first priority. And that’s sad.
The distinctions will slowly become clearer and clearer. The “free market” of student registrations will declare open educators who truly teach and share of themselves with students to be the winners, while the intellectual misers will be left to sit alone in their ivory towers counting their publications, unable to understand why students no longer sign up for their classes (or attend the universities whose policies uphold these attitudes) and unable to understand that they don’t own the copyrights in their publications – the publishers do.
It’s unclear how much of this lawsuit is Moulton’s publisher, and how much of it is him. We expect this kind of behavior from publishers. Let’s hope that Moulton is just caught in the crossfire here. But if a person is concerned about protecting their intellectual property, teaching just isn’t the right profession for them. They need to find a new one.
My newest boy, sixth month-old Lorenzo, has a shirt that says “Fun To Be Me.” I’m feeling that way lately.
This week I was named the USU College of Education and Human Services Researcher of the Year for 2008. It was a huge compliment from my peers here at USU and automatically makes me a finalist for the USU Robins Award, one of the university’s most prestigious (and tradition-rich) annual awards.
However, even more fun is my new role at the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning. I’ve been Founder and Director at COSL (pronounced “causal”, with a short “o”) ever since it’s official launch in September 2005. But recently I’ve had a pining to do less administrating and more work – more writing code, more writing papers, more getting closer to the people we try to serve. So, effective this week, I have changed roles to “Evangelist and Idea Guy” at COSL. The change in role will let me focus more on accomplishing the great work we have set out before us, and allow me to continue to contribute to the Center in the ways I’m best suited to.
I’m just as happy to say that Dr. Brett Shelton, my office neighbor in Instructional Technology, is taking over the Directorship at COSL. For those of you who haven’t met him, Brett is an extremely gifted and talented instructional technologist (or learning scientist, Brett? LOL) with a great career underway in the area of open gaming. You can see some of his work featured on the IMRC website (look for the HEAT project), and get a flavor for the real Brett over at Rhymes With Purple (though he hasn’t posted in a while).
What a great Friday it is! I hope things are going as well for you as they are for me. Happy weekend!
