On education and digital rights and the internet

I’ve been a fan of Terry Fisher‘s for some time now, even prior to reading Promises to Keep. Thinking about it, I guess it must have been around the time a friend pointed me towards Digital Music: Problems and Possibilities sometime in 2001, though I lost track until sometime in 2004, when Malc pointed me at Chapter 6 of Promises To Keep.

So it was with some eager anticipation that I followed up on Cory’s tip re a paper that Terry co-authored, on The Digital Learning Challenge: Obstacles to Educational Uses of Copyrighted Materials in the Digital Age. Thanks, Cory!. [While the link is to the abstract, it is possible to download the entire paper via the same link. Wouldn’t it be ironic if you couldn’t do that…]

A few quotes:

From the executive summary:

  • We found that provisions of copyright law concerning the educational use of copyrighted material, as well as the business and institutional structures shaped by that law, are amongst the most important obstacles to realising the potential of digital technology in education.

From Part One: The Overview:

  • Perhaps no area holds more potential for such transformation than education. Many diverse and exciting initiatives demonstrate how rich sources of digital information could enhance the transfer of knowledge. Yet at the same time, the change in education arguably has been less radical, especially in comparison to mundane endeavours such as selling a used bicycle …..There are many complex reasons for this slow pace of change, including lack of resources and resistance to new practices.
  • Digital technology makes informative content easier to find, to access, to manipulate and remix, and to disseminate. All of these steps are central to teaching, scholarship, and study.

If you are even vaguely interested in the use of digital technology in education, you should read the paper. It is rich in content and in context. And written by people who care.

A related subject. I wrote some time ago on DOPA and the issues it creates, and many people better versed than me on the subject have commented since. Now I’d always believed that the Numero Uno reason for DOPA, according to its proposers, was to reduce the risk of mature evildoers preying on young unsuspecting students.

Which is why I found a recent study, published by the Crimes Against Children Research Center, both comforting as well as disturbing. Comforting that sexual solicitation of minors by strangers via the web is down. Disturbing that the strangers concerned are using new and adapted techniques and concentrating on getting photos and videos uploaded by the children. Entitled Online Victimisation of Youth: Five Years Later, it is also well worth a read; you can find a copy of the report here.

This is primarily to let you read and digest at leisure, I will comment more fully once I have had the chance to do the same.

On going “ping” rather than “ka-ching”

Recent posts and comments by David Churbuck and Johnnie Moore formed the kernels for this post. Thanks, guys.

I quote from David’s post on Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead:

The Dead were the first band to encourage their fans to record shows and share them. As Garcia said, when the band was done with the music it was the fan’s to share. The only rule was no selling or profiteering and the fans were self-policing, criticizing anyone who tried to sell bootlegs.

People have often asked me how I dared to state that Jerry Garcia influenced my thinking on opensource more than any other person. There’s no better answer than the quote above.

When the band was done with the music it was the fan’s to share. We should call this the Garcia Rule. [David, you seem best placed to get this Rule published :-) no attribution necessary except to Jerry]

Everything else is secondary. Much of the pushback and anger to do with DRM and IPR issues is captured in that sentence. Everyone’s happy to pay for value created. But not to keep paying for it. We want creativity in the regeneration and augmentation of value, in the co-creation of that value, in the distribution of that value. Instead what we have is creativity in the regeneration and augmentation of cost, of billing. Pah.

Which takes me to Johnnie’s comment on my altruism post. We need to claim our right to be altruistic back, I cannot understand how altruism somehow became pinko lefty degenerate.

Human beings’ brains are wired to go “ping” when they understand something, not “ka-ching”. We will land up monetising what we do Because Of rather than With. And maybe sometimes we won’t. Maybe often we won’t.

So I continue to question and challenge things that make it hard for us to go “ping”, to have that bulb light up in individual and collective heads.

  • When the band was done with the music it was the fan’s to share.
  • When the teacher was done with the lesson it was the student’s to share.
  • When the writer was done with the book it was the reader’s to share.

There is a set of premises, both explicit as well as tacit, when we exchange value. Any attempt to change those premises post-facto is questionable, to say the very least.

People get paid for doing things, and understand how they get paid for it. Take the copyright argument, this amazing realisation that songs published in 1958 will go out of copyright in a few years time. Did the artists know about this in 1958? I guess so, but maybe they didn’t understand or care. Did they know about it in the 1960s? I guess so, though maybe they were too stoned to figure it out. I find it hard to believe that they’ve suddenly come to this realisation. What they’re doing is breaking the Garcia Rule. We’ve already paid for it.

  • An aside: If you bought a fifty-year lease on a house you knew what the premises were. If you landed up living longer than you expected, and the lease was about to expire, you would have to pay more to extend the lease.
  • Novelists and songwriters understood the deal they were entering into. If they want to extend the period of copyright then maybe they, the novelists and songwriters, should pay for it. And the payments can be placed into a Creative Commons -like pool and be used for fighting bad DRM and IPR law.
  • On the other hand maybe that’s a bad idea, when I see what happens with things like the Universal Service Fund. Or maybe we can avoid that by opensourcing the management of that fund.

More on TPPA

Dennis Howlett raised a question after my post on Pip Coburn’s book. [BTW it was by no means an attempt to critique the book, I haven’t even finished reading it yet.]

Let me try and put my point forward differently, see if it makes sense to you.

A change function has to bridge two or more different states.

TPPA, in the Coburn definition, is part of this function.

So far so good. And while some of it may seem “obvious” I have no problem with “obvious”, give me more.

I was then musing about the different states, the before and after.

And I came to this realisation.

Before Generation M, the before state and the after state were both “within the organisation”. So TPPA looked at what one used to do within the organisation as part of the basis for determining pain of adoption.

With Generation M, the before state is at home and the after state is at work. And with consumerisation and increased mobility, multitasking support and use of multimedia, with social software and opensource, the whole adoption model for Generation M is different. Where the before state is outside the firm and generational, TPPA is very high. This is not an issue of training. Generation M will resist what doesn’t make sense to them and vote with their feet and their fingers.

Does that help?

Thinking about Generation M and technology adoption

I’ve been reading the Change Function by Pip Coburn. Well worth a read.

Pip defines change as a function of the perceived crisis versus the total perceived pain of adoption, which he calls TPPA.

I find TPPA fascinating. Not because of what it means to fogeys like me, but because of its importance to Generation M.

TPPA is by definition relative to current installed software and the alternate version sought to be implemented.

Generation M will have high TPPA in the context of traditional enterprise architectures, tools and techniques. High TPPA in the context of current enterprise monocultures. Low TPPA in the context of social software and Web 2.0.

This time around, it is the enterprise that has to adjust itself in order to reduce TPA, whereas until now the onus of relieving TPA has been borne by the new entrant.

Interesting times.

On doubts and certainties

I’ve always enjoyed the Francis Bacon quotation:

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.

It seems to mean more to me as I grow older. Odd, that.

And it was with this quotation in mind that I resonated with Doc Searls’s statement that blogs are essentially provisional in nature, and I try and behave that way.

So you can imagine how I felt when I read in Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography:
….And as the chief ends of conversation are to inform or to be informed, to please or to persuade, I wish well-meaning and sensible men would not lessen their power of doing good by a positive assuming manner that seldom fails to disgust, tends to create opposition, and to defeat most of those purposes for which speech was given to us.

In fact, if you wish to instruct others, a positive dogmatical manner in advancing your sentiments may occasion opposition and prevent a candid attention.

If you desire instruction and improvement from others, you should not at the same time express yourself fixed in your present opinions. Modest and sensible men, who do not love disputation, will  leave you undisturbed in the possession of your errors. In adopting such a manner, you can seldom expect to please hearers or obtain the concurrence you desire.

Pope judiciously observes: Men must be taught as if you taught them not, and things unknown proposed as things forgot.

Interesting sentiments. And how pleasant to be able to quote them without having to worry about copyright, I think even retrospective Son-of-Mickey-Mouse Acts will leave Benjamin Franklin alone. But maybe I’m wrong.