Pedagogy First!

Week 12- Copyrights and Accessibility

The TECH Act is really interesting and I’m impressed with the following excerpt: “An educator may show or perform any work related to the curriculum, regardless of the medium, face-to-face in the classroom - still images, music of every kind, even movies. There are no limits and no permission required. Under 110(2), however, even as revised and expanded, the same educator would have to pare down some of those materials to show them to distant students.” Also, the checklist that was provided at the end of the article seems pretty handy at the time of selecting and presenting copyright materials for classroom use.  Just to be on the safe side I usually use images, music, and videos from the Creative Commons, (http://creativecommons.org/), where users may copy, display and perform the work for non-commercial purposes.

When creating an online course, I have to keep in mind the Web Accessibility Initiative guidelines. YouTube has the option of displaying closed captioned videos and I would select this feature at the time of searching for YouTube Videos.  In addition, my ESL students would benefit from watching closed caption videos since they are able to read the subtitles and be able to follow the script of the video.  

Copyright and Accessibility

It is good to know where to find the sources! I heard a lot of talk about these topics but I never looked for the actual definitions. This was a very interesting and educational reading about copyright and accessibility.
On the copyright issue I think it is good to be safe and use sources like Creative Commons in order to avoid problems. Wikipedia uses mainly photos that are copyright free and also Flickr, in the Commons section, has a huge amount of material with limited copyright. I don’t think it is worth it to try to push it too much and risk getting into trouble, even if it seems that the Teach Act is a pretty good umbrella (although it gives different weight to face-to face and online classes).
Accessibility issues are also very important to keep in mind.

copyright and legal stuff

I admit it, I need someone to filter all of this for me and give it to me in bullet points:  What you can do & What you can't do.  I remember hearing Cory Doctorow speak a couple of years ago and was impressed with what he had to say so I went searching for his opinion on copyright to share.  I found it on this YouTube, that topic starts about 6 minutes in but the whole interview is worth a listen.  

Imagine I will remain confused on these matters for a time while they continue to sift and sort themselves out.

Now, on to accessibility.  http://ww3compliance.com/ is a very informative site and the home page of the organization which in linked off of the MCC site.  In my discipline it has been difficult to comply to the California law of having closed captioning for videos shown in a classroom as many of the nursing videos come from companies in states where the law does not require closed captioning.  In recent years we have been limited as to what the department can purchase because of the required closed captioning.  We had purchased streaming rights for many productions but the streaming did not come with closed captioning, even though it was a California production company, they got around that providing us with DVDs that did have closed captioning so that it was available in the lab if the student requests it.  The leap one takes for closed captioning is for the hearing impaired, in most cases I would say that is true, but I have had more than one english as a second language learner appreciate the closed captioning to help them understand the content.  They like being able to read along with the audio. 

Week 12: Copyright, Accessiblity, Legal Stuff (Cohort 2)

I posted on these in my first semester.

But since then, I've been looking at mashups, and thinking about what I think about copyright, having already learned the facts. I have been unable to reach a decision. I thought I was "copyleft", that is, opposed to copyright as limiting information. But then I read Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget and have come to the conclusion the people really need to be paid for their original work. There is an argument that nothing is ever original, of course...

Here's the thing to watch, the thing that made me rethink copyright. Not because I agree with its message but because its insistence on copyleft made me question things.

It's a documentary from a couple of years ago called RIP! A Remix Manifesto. View it at its original site: http://films.onf.ca/rip-a-remix-manifesto/ (or if you're happy about the commercials and business model at Hulu, you can view it there).   It's long but worth the time if you're interested in these issues, as we see mashups all around us now.

Getting an understanding of the mashup trend can help us with our own views on copyright, plagiarism, etc. Worth doing, I think.

Week 12: Explore copyright, accessibility and legal stuff.

Cohort 3

• Learn about the TEACH Act (this UT site is good).
• Learn about online accessibility issues.
• Blog about what you learned.

Cohort 2

Members of cohort two should be reporting on their progress implementing ideas from last semester and providing feedback and support for cohort three members and each other

 

Catching Up: By the way, if you are catching up on old prompts, you can see all of them by clicking on the weekly prompts category label (see box to the right).

 

Week 13 Part Two: HTML 5

I realize HTML 5 is not what we are talking about here - but changes to how the web / html is being presented does affect us. The W3 group is rewriting the code standards. The big browsers committing to what they will support. Hopefully - yes hopefully - when we create a page or website and follow their new standards, what we see on FireFox, Internet Explorer, Safari, etc will look similar. That webdesigners/code writers will not have to perform as many strange and twisted dances to get their sites to work. No more different styles sheets for different browser presentations. Code hacks to make IE happy.

Dream Big.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/

The write up is there.

Abstract

This specification defines the 5th major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web: the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). In this version, new features are introduced to help Web application authors, new elements are introduced based on research into prevailing authoring practices, and special attention has been given to defining clear conformance criteria for user agents in an effort to improve interoperability.

Of course it is written in techie code. I was wading through, feeling a bit overwhelmed. I will need to decipher it is small bites.

But that last bit they said -- "...in an effort to improve interoperability." Oh be still my beating heart. Maybe I won't have to field endless questions about why does my site look so different everywhere I look at it? 

OK - back to reality here. HTML5 standards. Coming soon to a browser near you.

More later.

~Claudia

Week 13: Legality and accessibility

Ok... I have to admit, I usually need a tutor or an interpreter to get through all the copyright laws. Is there copyright for dummies? Maybe this week's reading was already masticated and spit out for dummies. Like some of my colleagues here on PF, I play it safe by using my own photos, recordings or videos or using photos from flickr and videos from youtube. The trend toward the creation of more open educational resources will make things a lot easier. However, as I've posted in other blogs, I'm frustrated with the quality of open ed resources in Spanish, but am hopeful.

On the accessibility front, I feel comfortable with my class organization and formatting. After this week's reading, I did catch one area in which I could improve - making my links more descriptive.

BUT.....and this is a BIG BUT.....I struggle with the video and audio transcriptions because one of the objectives of a language course is to develop listening comprehension skills. I realize that I need better guidance on how to fulfill both the objectives of the course and at the same time be sensitive to accessibility issues. 

Students in all of the on ground classes have as part of their tests, a listening comprehension assessment. I have to incorporate this into my online classes as well and to develop this skill, I have to provide them with listening activities throughout the semester. My problem is twofold:

1. If I provide transcripts with all listening activities, they will not be forced to develop this skill 

2. I cannot test listening skills if there are transcripts provided

Copyleft, CC, the TEACH Act, and more

First, cool news: YouTube is supposedly providing automatic captioning for video, using voice recognition technology. Here's a (duh) YouTube video about it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTvHIDKLFqc . This Gizmodo article says they started last month -- I hadn't tried it so I didn't know whether that was true. I just asked them to caption my 22-minute video on grading essays in Moodle. You click on the Caption and Subtitles button after you log in and find a video you've uploaded. It said it would be a few days for it to process, so I'll let you know!

The TEACH Act is the most wonderful thing, since it gets around so many of the Fair Use Copyright problems. I have a number of analog videos that are not available in digitized form, and this act made it possible to digitize them. I have no trouble with the "reasonable and limited portions" requirement, since I went from full-length videos to illustrative clips many years ago.

Robert is right that Creative Commons is a sign that things are getting better all the time. I can use Flickr images anywhere by searching for those that have CC licensing, and ask only for attribution and non-commercial use. CC is one result of the copyleft movement which began with open source software (sorry, a little history -- occupational hazard). And now it's part of the much wider movement toward Open Education, the idea that used to be edupunk (a term created by Jim Groom) and which has led to repositiories like Open Educational Resources and the movement toward open textbooks we looked at earlier. So this is an exciting time as researchers, faculty, instructional technologists, webheads, pundits, and educational institutions debate the pros and cons of openness in education and information.

Accessibility seems to me a no-brainer -- I confess to impatience both with those who insist that my every spoken word be captioned and with those who give students only text. It's all part of a varied pedagogy. Regardless of verifiable "ability", people learn differently and access information through different means. We should provide as many of those means as are comfortable to us (though we must strive to always learn new methods) and appropriate to the way we each teach our discipline. Grants like the captioning thing Robert has can help (I had him do my History 103 lectures that I have in Slideshare by sending him the mp3 audio files I'd recorded in class -- I have not yet gone through the transcripts as they will require pretty serious editing).

[Oooh, this is interesting. I just went to the Slideshare site myself and noticed something -- a "transcript" has been added to each slideshow (here's one you can look at. It seems to have been automatically created from the text on my slides. Too bad the more I do this, the less text I put on my slides...]

Anyway, using different methods to reach students helps everyone, not just those with a verified "disability". We all learn differently. When I first posted audio to go with each lecture, I did it in response to having a blind student who used a text reader. I wanted him hearing my voice instead. But I asked on evaluations who had used the audio and what they thought, and many people were listening to the audio for various reasons, all because it helped their learning.. So it's not about disability -- it's about learning.

I use Edustream.org as my multimedia server of choice when sharing with my online students material covered under Fair Use or Teach Act. When posting the link to the multimedia, I also make sure to (1) provide a CC transcript, (2) a written summary of key points, or (3) if I created the multimedia then I might have embedded the text in the video (e.g., text in a ppt that was screencasted).

With publicly available multmedia plus on the fly transcriptions, plus creative commons, it's getting better all the time.

Week 13 - Legal Stuff

One thing that I was pleased to see in the link about accessibility provided this week was the statement that, "others use slow Internet connections, modems or equipment that cannot easily download large files" (paragraph 3). This is something I keep in mind as an online instructor.  Having too many large files can interfere with how a computer functions in some cases, even with high-speed internet, so I always try to look for items that do not require a large download.  Tools like Wimba Voice Authoring, for which I always write transcripts (more accessibility), help.  It seems to require less computer resources than downloading and playing an MP3 file, for example.

I think that the LMS can definitely play a role in accessibility.  I use two different systems and I find that creating HTML in one is a little easier than in the other.  There are also resources out there that can help with accessibility.  Here at MiraCosta we currently have access to a database of videos that are digitized for online use and that have closed-captioning.  You need a login and password (available through the library), but the database is available here:

Intelecom Online Resources Network

I have looked around at the videos on this site and I am glad to see there are resources like this available to instructors.

The topic of videos leads me to the TEACH act.  I took it upon myself to learn about these things as an instructor before I started teaching, but not everyone may have this knowledge or information.  I was wondering if there could ever be a chance of having an online course about these subjects (a mini-course) for individuals who are teaching online before they start teaching online.  It might also be a way to model ideas on how to set up online courses.  I know that I have gotten some great ideas just by seeing other models.  I am sure there are some issues with having a training like this about which I am not aware as a part-time faculty member, but I would have taken it myself if it was available before I started teaching online.

-Laura

PS: My suggestion here is not any reflection on the Program for Online Teaching.  I think this blog and program have been more than helpful for me in teaching me more about online teaching.  I am glad to see that some people in this program are taking it before they start teaching online, too!