Technology360

What Fair Use Is–And How It works #pubmedia

The title says it all about this helpful overview of DCMA fair use provisions by Ashkan Karbasfrooshan in MediaPost’s Online Video Insider blog.  Thanks to Patricia Torres-Burd of Houston PBS for the tip.

Link:  MediaPost.

Update 2 January 2012: And, from a comment on this post, thanks to Dru Sefton for a heads up on Patricia Aufderheide’s excellent essay on the same topic in Current.  --Dennis

Jakob Nielsen study: kids don't use search

Liz Gannes reports on a study of 90 children age 3-12 in the U.S. and Israel by Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group of a wide variety of children's websites, including PBS Kids.  The study concludes that, unlike adults, children are more app oriented than search oriented.  Interesting reading.  Link:  GigaOM.  --Dennis

Digital archiving for indigenous peoples

Not all media efforts need large audiences for success.  Indigenous cultures are at risk throughout the world (UNESCO says ten languages die out each year) and the spread of mass media and digital connectivity has arguably accelerated it.  Dr. Kimberly Christen, a professor at Washington State University, however, is working to help indigenous peoples archive their own cultures using digital archiving.  See Aboriginal archive offers new DRM at BBC News and Digital archiving tool to give voice to indigenous peoples at WSU Today.  Thanks to Television Archiving for the tip.  --Dennis

Public Media, Public Education, and the Public Good

Henry Jenkins has a two-part interview with Heather Chaplin on these topics (both professors).  Chaplin is an advocate for a National Public Lightpath.  An excerpt:

[J] Your white paper opens with the provocative question, "what part of the Internet is going to be devoted to the public interest?" How would you answer that question?

[C] It's actually a really hard question to answer, based on what your notion of "in the public interest" is. I mean, NPR and PBS have presences on the Internet. And I suppose you could argue that there are probably millions of sites out there that serve the general public good. So, if I were to play devil's advocate against myself, I suppose I would argue that the very nature of the Internet - the anyone-can-publish idea - is in itself a public good.  ¶  But here's the thing, I'm not really the libertarian type. I don't believe that things will necessarily just sort themselves out if left alone. When I talk about creating a piece of the Internet in the public interest, I'm really talking about both public ownership of the infrastructure and content created specifically to educate, enlighten and enrich in the interests of genuine literacy and civic engagement. …

Link:  Confessions of an Aca-Fan.  Part One.  Part Two.  --Dennis

Congressmen: Higher ed must police file sharing or lose financial aid

Cory Doctorow writes:

Democratic legislators have introduced a bill that will tie university financial aid funding to universities imposing stiff penalties for file-sharing, and to universities subsidizing student subscriptions to failed DRM-based systems like Napster and Ruckus. This is about as ugly as pork-barrel politics can get: politicians are so in debt to four of five ailing giants from the entertainment industry that they're prepared to deny low-income children access to a college education if universities don't punish kids for listening to music and piss away money on a useless service that no one wants to use. ...

Link:  BoingBoing.  --Dennis

National LambdaRail + Internet2 merger off

News that the long-awaited merger between National LambdaRail (NLR) and Internet2 is off doesn't cheer most people in the academic/research advanced networking community.  For the story, see John Timmer, Internet2, LambdaRail can't even agree to disagree; merger called off (Ars Technica); John Fischman, Breaking Up, Internet2-LambdaRail Style (Chronicle of Higher Education); and Anick Jesdanun, Ultra-Fast Internet Networks Won't Merge (AP).  For analysis see Gordon Cook, A Sad Day as Emotion Drives R&E Networking in the USA (Cook's Collaborative Edge); Internet2 Responds (Cook's Collaborative Edge); and Some Unsolicited Advice: NLR Should Blow Its Own Horn (Cook's Collaborative Edge).  --Dennis

First Monday has moved

The excellent online peer-reviewed journal about the Internet, First Monday, has moved from www.firstmonday.org to Open Journal Systems at the University if Illinois at Chicago.  Its new (unmemorizable) URL is www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/ and it now requires a free registration.  Its archives have been moved here also.  In a big step forward, it now has RSS and Atom feeds, so I've subscribed in Bloglines and will be seeing new things as they're posted rather than every few months when I happen to remember I haven't visited the site in awhile. 

From the September 2007 number, check out Desperately seeking the consumer: Personalized search engines and the commercial exploitation of user data by Theo Röhle.  Here's the abstract:

With reference to surveillance studies theory, this paper critically assesses the role of personalized search engines as a mediator between advertisers and users. It first sketches the economic and technical background of online marketing and personalized searches. Then, it engages in an in–depth discussion of two examples of personalized search engines with regard to the data collection process used and the way in which this data is used for advertising purposes. The discussion shows that users’ information needs, as well as their personal data, are subject to a growing pressure in terms of commercial exploitation. Essentially, search engines now fulfill the task of translating information needs into consumption needs.

Link:  First Monday.  --Dennis

Youth Radio: The Power of Collegial Pedagogy

Henry Jenkins has a pair of interesting, if typically long, posts on Youth Radio.  Link:  Confessions of an Aca/Fan, Part One, Part Two.  --Dennis

Remixes and mashups in education

Brian Lamb of the University of British Columbia has an article in the current issue of EDUCAUSE Review which provides a very useful philosophical and practical overview of repurposing digital content and the application of this in education.  By way of introduction, he writes:

... mashups involve the reuse, or remixing, of works of art, of content, and/or of data for purposes that usually were not intended or even imagined by the original creators. Although the historical roots of remix and mashup culture are deep, the properties of digital media are what have given ordinary individuals the power to reshape works on an unprecedented scale. In recent years, with the emergence of Web 2.0, the ability to copy, to combine, and to remix has been extended. Increasingly, it's not just works of art that are appropriated and remixed but the functionalities of online applications as well.  ¶  For educators and policy-makers, already struggling with the many cultural and logistical challenges posed by digital technologies, mashups complicate the picture even while offering tremendous promise. What, exactly, constitutes a valid, original work? What are the implications for how we assess and reward creativity? Can a college or university tap the same sources of innovative talent and energy as Google or Flickr? What are the risks of permitting or opening up to this activity? ...

and further,

... Remix is the reworking or adaptation of an existing work. The remix may be subtle, or it may completely redefine how the work comes across. It may add elements from other works, but generally efforts are focused on creating an alternate version of the original. A mashup, on the other hand, involves the combination of two or more works that may be very different from one another. In this article, I will apply these terms both to content remixes and mashups, which originated as a music form but now could describe the mixing of any number of digital media sources, and to data mashups, which combine the data and functionalities of two or more Web applications. ...

Link:  EDUCAUSE Review [PDF version]  --Dennis

Virtual Worlds as Social-Science Labs

If you read the recent post below on Second Earth, you should also be interested in Andrea L. Foster's article  on the work Professor Edward Castronova of Indiana University at Bloomington in the area of virtual world applications.  Link:  Chronicle of Higher Education.  --Dennis