Joel Klein, former Chancellor of NYC Schools and now with News Corp.

He begins by noting that he doesn’t think an innate desire to learn drives us all to everything we need to learn. He had no interest in physics until a great teacher got him interested.

He says K-12 is broken. It’s broken for yesterday’s challenges, and certainly for tomorrow’s. The US is getting a porr return on its education investment. From 1970 until now, we have 60% more teachers in the US. But scores on reading, math, and science are flat lines. Any business would shut this down. Only 35% of students leave HS ready for college. Internationally, we are way at the bottom, including countries that spend way less than us. He recommends we read The Race Between Education and Technology. We are not producing enough students qualified for the work force. How can develop a disruptive delivery system that will get the kids the skills they need?

The system now is designed entirely wrong. It’s top down. The Chancellor decides on class size, e.g. Why can’t the schools decide that? There’s accountability at the top: You dance to the tune of the politicians and the unions. The worst part of his job was, he says, to be in an environment that did not constantly strive for excellence and that did not embrace innovation. So, he built it on local accountability: every school got a letter grade so that parents would be disruptive. The grades were based on where they were. He shut down 100 schools out of 1200. He opened up 400 competition-driven HS’s + 100 new charter schools. Seniority, lifetime benefits, lockstep pay all work against excellence. He created innovation zones. This has resulted in higher scores. (He gives an example: He came across a student who was texting his tutor in Mumbai who was more focused on him than was his local teacher.)

From his slide:

• Schools must become intelligent, data driven and accountable.

• Contents must be digitized, highly engaging, accessible, and flexible. Games work, for e.g.

• Learning by extend beyond the classroom.

• Education must be highly customized. Change the ways, the pace, the differentiation. Not diff content for every kid.

• Human capital must be dramatically redefined. In the past we’ve bet on the quantity, not the quality of people. Instead we should find where the most effective changes would be.

He ends by citing a WSJ article calling for a move away from the manufacturing model, that could lead to having half as many educators (!), smaller schools, higher graduation rates, and test scores.

Q: Spain’s scores are lower, but there is less of a sense of urgency.

Q: I agree with your solutions, but I analyze the problems differently. The US health care system is actually performing worse than schools, but we don’t use the rhetoric of shutting it down. The causes are underlying poverty, etc.
Q: In Britain, the best marks come from Chinese students on school lunch programs, so the argument from poverty is weak.
Joel: NY and Boston poor kids are way ahead of the same in Detroit and LA. It’s not poverty. It’s education. I talk about shutting things down because we have a monopoly provider. Nobody would agree to placing their kid randomly in a NYC school; everyone wants choice. It’s the poor who don’t have it.
– The real issue is fairness.
– The skills divide is going to kill us.

Q: Three massive, broken industries are heavily unionized. How much of the massive failure of the ed system is due to the unions?
A: There’s no doubt that that’s an important part of it. Monopoly providers are self-interested. A choice model would protect people.

Q: It’s not just the unions but the broader mass-production system. Higher ed is highly competitive, but lives within rigid, top-down, hierarchical systems. It’s not poverty but the infrastructure of mass systems.

Q: In the next sessions, how can we look for political will without a leader?
A: A long discussion over drinks…

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This is a PechaKucha session: Each presenter talks to 20 slides, each for 20 seconds, run on a timer.

Patrick Newell begins. The Japanese educational system worked well post-war but now it is forcing children into doing mindless work to prepare themselves to enter an elementary school or higher school. The school system does the basics well. But they’re declining, in part because of the unions, aging boards of education, male-domination, and an inability to fire teachers. The power of the red marker: they’re so afraid to make mistakes. E.g., Japanese kids rank lower on spoken English than, say, Koreans, because they worry about making mistakes. Japan is torn between advancing into the globalized world and focusing on unity. Japan tends not to change, except in response to disaster. How does Japan move forward? Through inquiry, curiosity, getting past being exam-driven. Their economy demands that they be more creative. It has to go from focusing on the “sage on the stage” to empowering the learner. Neural science is confirming what we’ve always known: really being connected with all five senses helps us learn. Also, give students the digital tools, an end goal, and get out of the way. Japan needs to learn new means of assessment. Multiple intelligences: Japan could be strong in collective intelligence.

Dali Yang, prof of political science at U of Chicago and in Beijing. China has undergone massive changes in science and tech in the past 30 yrs. The number of college grads is going up steeply, starting in the new millennium. Chinese gov’t investment in sci and tech is becoming a much greater percentage of GDP, although lower than in the US. Citations and patents are also increasing rapidly; its share of patents has more than doubled. But the expansion of college grads has devalued the degree; many grads find it hard to get a job. This has invited growing interest by foreign companies,educators, and investors. Many western universities have low-intensity commitments in China. But some universities have full-fledged campuses in China. New models of collaboration are beginning to emerge: registered entities that offer a wide range of offerings, but not degrees. U of Chicago is in the business district of Beijing. In Beijing there are 750,000 college students. A symbol: U of Chicago is returning to China a raptor skeleton it had stolen from China. He talks about some initiatives, e.g., programs about copyright, political economy. Another symbol: The arts program. U of Chicago is quite committed to this and to expanding it. But, while college intake has increased, the number of Chinese children is declining; this has implications for the educational system.

Sridhar Rajgopalan asks why with all our progress, our educational systems are not getting better and better. The learning levels for the very poor are very low. Sridhar has tests that enable benchmarking that start conversations about whether students are really learning, rather than resting satisfied that more students are in school. There is mechanical learning, but not a lot of understanding. Sridhar’s group develops sheets for teachers to help them teach children basic ideas that they are missing. They also have in-school communication programs. Most important, it helps them analyze why the misconceptions happen. E.g., students think the largest angle is the one with the longest arms. “MindSpark” is a “personalized adapative learning tool.” “The real power of tools like these will come not from animation but intelligence.” Students who make different mistakes are guided through different thought processes. The aim is to provide personalized education at scale. Results: All children benefit, but the weakest students benefit the most. This is only on partially about tech. It’s mainly about the science of learning: How do students learn better. Interdisciplinary. It’s important to develop a body of systematic knowledge: When children are learning, these are the misconceptions, this is how to detect it, this is how to correct. .

Diego Sanchez de Leon, Head of Talent and Organization Performance at EALA Accenture. He sees the integration of work and learning. Learning will be continuous, on demand, just in time, integrated with work. Learning will be contextual, embedded in what we do every day. Individual leadership. This applies better to technological learning than to behavioral learning. We need to reach a balance between the two. This means more of a demand output. People need to have the mindset to learn. That means self-management, self-awareness, self-assessment. They need multi-channel blending and choice; e.g., some people like to listen to books when they drive, others don’t. Unit duration is going down: from weeks of learning down to seconds. That gives us a sense of continuous learning. Learning is collaborative, and we need to learn how to measure that. There will be more transparency of value of skills vs. cost. We need to get better at balancing rights and obligations. We may well see the same amount of spending spent on fewer people. We need to master multiple content resources. We need a common design method and tools for developing learning areas. The shift in investment will go to learning and experience and less to developing materials. Finally, we will reuse everything on the job for learning. The aim is to increase our assimilation capacity: our ability to do things.

Discussion: Chris Meyer, our host, asks: What did you respond to positively?

– Personalization, mass customization of ed via technology

– People assume that we need to get away from the factory model of education. Was the factory model so bad? It created mass literacy and numeracy, homogenous population. If you move away from it, you risk the base knowledge that makes innovation possible. We have seen rebellions against the factory modely since the beginning of the 20th century, which has led to huge failures among poorer children and has broadened inequality.
– I have a lot of evidence that the factory model leaves behind poor learners. Do you have evidence?
– Yes. In Britain. Private schools that have continued with traditional models have completely dominated the progressive schools that have emphasized individual learning. The history of 20th c England is the proof.
– During the industrial age, mass ed worked. We’re in a different context now. We’re in a different era.
– The rates of people going to college in the UK are flatlining because people are ill-served by the old model.
– Let’s stay out of the old trad vs. progressive ed debate. We’re in a new place. Mass edu is a type of instruction well-suited to some tasks, but there are times kids need another pedagogical style.
– Personalized is great, but we need to teach thousands of students
– We need a balance.
– As a Brit, I disagree with the causes of the failures of ed. Also, we need to contrast base knowledge with how to work things out. To what extent do we need to educate people with the base knowledge vs. the processing of that ed? Progressive teaching of traditional curriculum vs. transforming the curriculum because the subjects have changed.
– Fiscal austerity worldwide. Cuts to ed budgets. Even providing the basic needs is a challenge. But there are also special opportunities.
– Institutions focus on costs. I heard “free,” but free to whom? We are just reallocating costs.We have to convince decision makers that this is in the best interests of their constituents. Also, don’t ignore the “great number of feral people” out there. We need to civilize them.
– Times have changed. The nature of education and knowledge for our children is different, so ed has to be diff
– The basics are important. But the world has changed. This includes how you measure, especially for workers who are learning.
– Separate what we teach kids from how we teach them. Knowledge is being depreciated in ed. The teacher is not the only source, of course, but kids need to know algebra. What counts are not the techniques but the standards. So much has become “self-referential knowledge”: what does this mean to you, rather than mastering the skills.
– Hundreds of millions of people in the world are excluded from any kind of ed. Tech enables us to reach them. First let’s use what we have to deliver ed to those who have nothing. Also, looking at social networking: people are teaching each other. Why don’t we use it much more to bring it into education?
– The key thing is the individual learner.
– The factory model is not working in India. We need to build rigor into how we teach, and use the tech model too.
– How do you create excellent teachers. In the 19th c in France, they were educating great teachers. Now that’s gone downhill, especially in the lower grades. This is a problem.
– We’ve been working off of a scarcity model of knowledge. Instead of a push technology, we have students pulling knowledge to them. The goal of ed has to be some kind of balanced competency, but we’ve focused on the metrics of teaching rather than the metrics of learning. Also, we should have students at this event.
– 48% of US college grads never read a book again. Healthy human babies are incredible learning machines. We’re predisposed to learn throughout our lives. Students are learning every day although they may not find interesting what teachers are teaching.
– Many ideas people think are new are not. We’ve seen generations of experimentation. The amount of knowledge to acquire to enter the world is bigger than ever before. Self-direction has to be acquired. You have to learn to discipline yourself before you can be self-directed, and the factory model is required for this.

– How do you build collective intelligence?
Patrick Newell: Schools are about human interaction and collaboration. There’s as much value in that as in the content conveyed. Have students work within groups. Get the balance right between tech and human.
– [Note that I’m using a “-” to indicate a shift in speakers] Students are risk-takers. Edu systems are increasingly risk-averse.
– “Mass customization” is about modules, e.g., an algebra model. We need to be aware that there is some finite set of modules students need. We’re not talking about infinite number of ways of teaching something.

– We should be defining the user requirements.
Chris Meyer: We’re trying to understand: what does edu need to offer society going forward? How relevant is the history to this?

– If we listened to Diego’s presentation, we would rethink teaching.

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I’m at a small conference — about 40 people — that is considering what would be “an effective education for the 21st Century.” It is the 16th edition of the Future Trends Forum, sponsored by the Fundacion de la Innovacion, sponsored by Bankinter, in Madrid. It promises to be an intense day and a half.

The group’s organizers have agreed to live blogging. I’ll do the best I can, although it’s likely to be difficult.

Chris Meyer begins the morning. He quotes from Chris Dede about moving from industrial era education to preparing people for 21st century “work, citizenship and life.” What kind of new institutions might be created? Chris M. says this is more driven by demand than supply, especially as people live longer. During the conference, we’ll be looking at innovations in parts of the world where the institutions are not as firmly fixed, to try to get a glimpse of what might emerge.

I opened the morning with a ten minute talk reviewing the survey members had completed, and talking about knowledge as a property of the network. If I get a chance, I’ll post it.

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I’m at CollabTech at Case Western, and came in late on a session about blurring the lines of ontrol in classrooms.

As I come in, Bill Deal is talking about encouraging students to tweet material related to the class. The students took to it, posting links to materials from around the Web. They averaged about 15 tweets (if I got that right). He says he’s tried other tech in classrooms, but this one really worked. In response to a question, he says that there was no interaction among twitterers outside of the class; they discussed using a hashtag, but some students wanted to keep their tweets private-ish.

Bernard Jim talks about his experience teaching 17-student seminars in which the students are expected to produce knowledge, not just consume it. He says the physical geography of the classroom puts all the tech at the front of the room, under the teacher’s control. [Surely they have laptops, though.] He begins each session by playing a song relevant to the day’s topic, and invites the students to play their music. The students initially resist this, but then take it up. The aim is for them to take possession of the tech in the classroom. He also wants them to understand that their cultural experiences are relevant to the course. (Bernard is a cultural historian.)

For example, he has them reading Burke on the sublime, who references Milton. “So, I’m teaching an 18th century philosophy who references a 17th century poet, to 21st century students who can be put off by a movie if it’s in black and white.” Burke asks what a frightening sound is: “a low tremulous intermitting sound.” So, Bernie plays a YouTube of the Halloween theme, to try to connect their experience to Burke.

Sometimes the students bring in their own references. E.g., in a class on letters discussing a letter from Abelard to Heloise (or was it vice versa), they brought in “Dramatic Reading of a Break-up Letter.”

In a different class they were talking about hypermasculinity, as in some of Michelangelo. The students responded with College Humor’s Power Thirst.

He also has a class on puzzles, which is “an extremely interactive class.” Once a week they have a puzzle challenge. On Pi Day (3/14), they took the Pi Day Challenge, up on the big screen. “You have a whole bunch of students yelling at me, which is what I like.”

Q: Do you ever get inappropriate student suggestions?
A: Yes, sometimes.
A: [bill deal] One tweet was “Great film of boobies” that turned out to be about birds.

Michael Kenney who teaches chemistry provided Kindles to 50 students. A third loved it. A third thought it was great for reading books, so they gave it to their parents [he says jokingly]. And a third sold it on ebay. Within class, it usefully kept all their texts in one place, although the lack of a file structure was a problem. But he got sued. ‘[He doesn’t say why and I didn’t find any info on a quick search.]

So, now they use the Entourage eDGe, which has a touch-sensitive Android tablet on one side and an ebook reader on the other. He’s hoping students can use these as their lab notebooks. [See Jean-Claude Bradley’s open notebook idea.] So far, he’s having the same results as with the Kindle. For one thing, the OS is underpowered and out of date. The eDGe concept “is very good, but it’s not going to replace” analog devices. His sits on a shelf, unused.

Q: [me] Have you connected with J-C Bradley.
A: Yes. Our aim is to have a cloud-based note-taking system. Bradley’s ideas are very good,.

Christine Hudak [twitter:infomatics1] , in the nursing school, has her students use twitter feeds to keep up with the ever-changing info. All the nursing students had to tweet, because social media are now being used with patients in hospitals. No personal tweets were allowed, although some students ignored that rule. They also had a private Facebook group page that they used for info sharing and communicating about projects; it was strictly student-driven. Christine didn’t see it until the end of the semester, and was very impressed. The page is being passed on to next year’s class.

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Elliot Maxwell is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk called “Openness: How increasing accessibility and responsiveness can transform processes and systems.” H3e says he came to the question by observing the spread and importance of the Net and its effect on institutions. He sees openness as a lens for understanding processes and systems.

Openness is a continuum, Elliot says. For example, open source software benefits from openness, but because decisions are made by assigned individuals, it is not itself fully open. Things are open if they’re accessible and can be modified, repurposed, and redistributed. Openness is in part an attitude, he says. E.g., a doctor is more open if s/he is more willing to listen to the patient and to take her/his time. “Openness is not necessarily a product of IT.”

Also, openness isn’t always the right answer. E.g., an electronic health record should be open enough that doctors can see it and so it can be immediately updated as lab results come in. But, it shouldn’t necessarily be open to other people, insurance companies, or the gov’t. Also, openness can make more haystacks, hiding the needles we need to find.

Elliot began thinking about this when Napster was at its high point. Traditional IP sees control as essential to creating an environment that encourages creation. But, we also want to encourage follow-on creators. There’s not a lot of research about how much incentive first creators need. (And, of course, first creators are themselves follow on creators.) Control is expensive and imperfect. (Think DRM). Open source, on the other hand, thinks value comes by distributing and sharing. But, it can be hard to evaluate all the contributions that come in.

Elliot lists some examples of increased openness, and spends some time talking about the attenmpts to open up clinical trials. (ClinicalTrials.gov and the Journal of Failed Clinical Trials.)

Elliot is also especially interested in higher education, which has been relatively unaffected by openness, although he expects that to change. (It’s easier for Harvard and other research institutions to support open access, he says, than, say, community colleges that have different goals and constraints. ) Elliot sees a rise in open educational resources, which will affect teaching institutions. OER will be increasingly driven by customers, rather than being course materials put up on the Web by a teacher. We will know more about how OERs are being used, they will become more interoperable, and there will be incentives for participation and use.

At CMU and other places, there’s work on harvesting what happens to and around digital educational materials. We need better data on student progress, educational outcomes, and the factors that affect student success. He says we also need research on the cmparative effectiveness of digital edu materials, and best practices. Also, it’d be great to extend fab labs digitally.

Elliot sees progress in opening up research. The Human Genome Project was the seminal event that changed the basic model of research, at least in the bio sciences. Open access journals are growing. But, too many institutions still only count publication in closed journals as a scholarly achievement. We don’t yet have good models for how to reward research that is immediately published.

Intellectual property rules need to be recalibrated to recognize the importance of follow-on innovators, and to enable more use by educators. Bayh-Dole should be modified to enable more open licensing. He would also like to see some “orphan work” legislation.

We should change the default of campus events so that they’re open, unless they’re specifically closed. “We should take advantage of greater openness to improve support services.” The government should fund open access to financial aid materials. NIH-funded research should be open to the public within 12 months should be extended to all non-classified research funded by the 11 fed agencies that spende over $100M in research. And the embargo time should be reudced to 6 months. The government ought to include funds for open access publishing when making grants, Elliot says.

Then there’s openness and transparency about academic degrees. We don’t know what it means to get a degree in something. We need more compatibility, comparability and portability of degrees. The government should encourage accrediting agencies to increase their focus on learning outcomes. (Currently only 19% of accrediting bodies say anything more than that a school is accredited or not.)

Q: [ethanz] You’re conflating openness and judging inputs and outputs. Evaluating schools by outcomes is one thing, but that’s different from openness.
A: Openness has to do with the access to the information.
Q: US News and World Report makes a closed evaluation based on open info. When you go more open, you can get unintended consequences. E.g., no one has done an open search engine, because it’s too game-able. What are the unintended consequences of opening up campus events, for example? E.g., Facebook opening up more and more private data. I was hoping you’d tell us more about where openness is inappropriate.
A: Yes. I’ve been talking about openness because that’s where it’s going.
Q: I agree with your framing of first and follow on innovators and with your general direction. But, the limits are important.
Q: As a historian, your directional arrow seems too one-dimensional. Historically, open and closed have worked hand in glove. E.g., the patent system closes paths but forces innovators to reveal what they have. E.g., the closedness of some medical processes.
A: Changing the default for university events would only be for events that were public anyway. And if I sound like I’m giving a litany of open

Q: [me] Is data more open if it’s been cleaned up and put into standardized formats. It’s more reusable, but it may also mean decisions have been made about it that anticipate some uses and not others?
A: It’s situational. In the long run it’s probably likely that all the slicing and dicing would evolve to a smaller way of using this info, because people would be able to build on that info — that’s just a guess. But, when people are unlikely to agree, getting it out quickly would be more usefl. Standardization has some benefits, but if it’s rigid it’s probably wrong.

Elliot concludes about talking about new means of certification. We’re going to find new ways of certifying people in a global environment. There aren’t educational institutions everywhere, and we have a new generation of self-directed learners. That will allow many more people to be certified.

Q: [wendy] What’s the most effective lever for openness? Is it giving credit for being open?
A: We need to recognize that the closed path is not the only way to build value.

Q: Transparency, openness, and open source are each different.
A: OS is a way of building code. Transparency lets us see, but not by itself affect…
Q: At the level of international relations, we can maybe get transparency, but openness will only come from individual administrations…
A: Transparency would let us see what’s happening. But I want us to be able to act on the info we see.

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A friend asked me to post an explanation of what I meant when I said at PDF09 that “transparency is the new objectivity.” First, I apologize for the cliché of “x is the new y.” Second, what I meant is that transparency is now fulfilling some of objectivity’s old role in the ecology of knowledge.

Outside of the realm of science, objectivity is discredited these days as anything but an aspiration, and even that aspiration is looking pretty sketchy. The problem with objectivity is that it tries to show what the world looks like from no particular point of view, which is like wondering what something looks like in the dark. Nevertheless, objectivity — even as an unattainable goal — served an important role in how we came to trust information, and in the economics of newspapers in the modern age.

You can see this in newspapers’ early push-back against blogging. We were told that bloggers have agendas, whereas journalists give us objective information. Of course, if you don’t think objectivity is possible, then you think that the claim of objectivity is actually hiding the biases that inevitably are there. That’s what I meant when, during a bloggers press conference at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, I asked Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Walter Mears whom he was supporting for president. He replied (paraphrasing!), “If I tell you, how can you trust what I write?,” to which I replied that if he doesn’t tell us, how can we trust what he blogs?

So, that’s one sense in which transparency is the new objectivity. What we used to believe because we thought the author was objective we now believe because we can see through the author’s writings to the sources and values that brought her to that position. Transparency gives the reader information by which she can undo some of the unintended effects of the ever-present biases. Transparency brings us to reliability the way objectivity used to.

This change is, well, epochal.

Objectivity used be presented as a stopping point for belief: If the source is objective and well-informed, you have sufficient reason to believe. The objectivity of the reporter is a stopping point for reader’s inquiry. That was part of high-end newspapers’ claimed value: You can’t believe what you read in a slanted tabloid, but our news is objective, so your inquiry can come to rest here. Credentialing systems had the same basic rhythm: You can stop your quest once you come to a credentialed authority who says, “I got this. You can believe it.” End of story.

We thought that that was how knowledge works, but it turns out that it’s really just how paper works. Transparency prospers in a linked medium, for you can literally see the connections between the final draft’s claims and the ideas that informed it. Paper, on the other hand, sucks at links. You can look up the footnote, but that’s an expensive, time-consuming activity more likely to result in failure than success. So, during the Age of Paper, we got used to the idea that authority comes in the form of a stop sign: You’ve reached a source whose reliability requires no further inquiry.

In the Age of Links, we still use credentials and rely on authorities. Those are indispensible ways of scaling knowledge, that is, letting us know more than any one of us could authenticate on our own. But, increasingly, credentials and authority work best for vouchsafing commoditized knowledge, the stuff that’s settled and not worth arguing about. At the edges of knowledge — in the analysis and contextualization that journalists nowadays tell us is their real value — we want, need, can have, and expect transparency. Transparency puts within the report itself a way for us to see what assumptions and values may have shaped it, and lets us see the arguments that the report resolved one way and not another. Transparency — the embedded ability to see through the published draft — often gives us more reason to believe a report than the claim of objectivity did.

In fact, transparency subsumes objectivity. Anyone who claims objectivity should be willing to back that assertion up by letting us look at sources, disagreements, and the personal assumptions and values supposedly bracketed out of the report.

Objectivity without transparency increasingly will look like arrogance. And then foolishness. Why should we trust what one person — with the best of intentions — insists is true when we instead could have a web of evidence, ideas, and argument?

In short: Objectivity is a trust mechanism you rely on when your medium can’t do links. Now our medium can. [Tags: objectivity transparency journalism media knowledge epistemology jay_rosen science everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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In my endless ego surfing, trying to fill an emptiness for which no number of trackbacks can suffice, I came across a posting about Everything Is Miscellaneous on the TWelchConsulting blog. Towards the end, the post says:

Imagine after Maria mastered that formula, this message appeared on her computer screen: “Maria, learners who enjoyed solving equations about one dimensional motion in physics with examples from space science also enjoyed . . . “

Sort of a cool idea…

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous education amazon ]

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Stuart Shieber, one of Harvard’s Open Access ringleaders, has started a blog on that topic. He says it’ll be occasional — maybe per week, not per day — and it promises to be reflective and important to those who care about making more of the world’s research and knowledge available to, well, the world. (Stuart is the director of Harvard’s Office for Scholarly Communication, and was one of the important voices in the push for Harvard’s open access initiatives.)

[Tags: open_access stuart_shieber harvard everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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The Columbia Science and Technology Law Review is going open access:

…we’ve refined our author agreement (already very liberal) to explicitly ensure that authors retain their copyrights, and we’re making our agreement public on our website. At the same time, we’re also embracing open publication, formally putting our articles under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial No-Derivatives license, and allowing our authors to distribute themselves under even more liberal licenses if they so choose.

Yay!

[Tags: open_access journals law_journals everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Harvard’s Office for Scholarly Communication has brought Kenneth Crews of Columbia Law School to talk about “Protecting Your Scholarship: Copyrights, Publication Agreements, and Open Access.”

How do all the things mentioned in his subtitle fit together, he asks, assuring us that they do.

Our goals as academics, he says, are to: advance scholarship, promote access to pubs, preserve academic freedom, expand the class roomk support research worldwide, build the next generation of research, and reduce the costs and barriers. Does it shift costs or reduce them, he asks?

Peter Suber defines open access as online, free of charage, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Is that the right definition, he asks. He says that as he’s traveled around the world, he’s seen access to the Internet is expanding rapidly. “People are connected.” It’s there as a potential and is in place in many places. But, in many of these places, there’s no cash to buy access to content. They can get to content if it’s made available on line. So, in addition to those other goals he’s listed, there’s altruism.

Why right now? The Harvard resolution (2008) requiring open access. The NIH public access policy (2008) puts works PubMedCentral. There are, of course, pitfalls: Misuse of work, etc. [missed some. sorry.]

There are challenges to these policies now. Congress has a bill to undo the NIH open access policy. There’s the DMCA’s anticircumvention provisions; the Copyright Office is holding hearings right now about exemptions to those processions. There’s the Google Books settlement that would provide tight controls to the accessibility and usability of that content. “Are we putting together a database of 20M volumes that is guaranteed to frustrate the heck out of the users?” There’s our distaste of other people making money with other people’s copyrights.

He gives a quick review of copyright: Just about everything is protected, if it’s “fixed in some tangible medium.” Copyright is as set of rights wrt reproduction, distribution, derivatives, performane and display, and DMCA rights. These rights can be unbundled and parceled out by the rights holder. Who owns the copyright isn’t very important. The real question is who has the particular rights within that bundle

Those rights are transferable. But they may be transfered or licensed, exclusive or not. In scholarly publishing, I might transfer rights to a publisher who then licenses back to me certain rights, such as the right to use it in further research, or to post portions on my Web site. Or, I might not transfer any rights, and instead license some rights to my publisher. Maybe I’ll license it to the publisher, stipulating that it be Creative Commons licensed. There are many, many possibilities. “So the process of engaging with a publisher is …. a process of negotiation.”

The context is changing. It’s becoming digital. Digital tech both can make scholarship more easily available, and it holds the potential for controlling access. Open access is key to the growth of scholarship. “The growth of scholarship comes from access to existing works,” as does its impact.

So, being a good steward of copyright requires understanding our interests, those of our institution, the revenue possibilities, and the interests of people I do not know and who may not be in my field. We should worry about maintaining the integrity of our work. Money matters. We need to worry about the business models.

“Not all copyrights are created equal…Not all works need to be treated in the same way.”

Who gets to decide all this: The author.

“Managing this work in a way that moves us toward open access publishing … is a good thing.” How to do that: Self publish. Use OA publishers (e.g., www.doaj.org). Put it in an institutional repository. And negotiate. “The happier the agreement, the longer the agreement.” “We have to look for language that does happy things for us.” He shows an example of happy language that gives the author right to post an article for free. Another: Language that lets the author use the article for her own work. A license leaves the unstated rights with the author. He notes that the law’s default does not require the publisher to include the author’s name and affiliation.

Tough questions about open access: Will colleagues respect publications in OA journals? (More so every day, he says.) OA compatible with peer review? (Yes, Kenneth says.) How do I manage my copyrights? How do I negotiate agreements? Who pays the pub costs. What about the economic surival of journals? (I don’t know the answers, he says, but the problem is more real than we often like to acknowledge.)

Key points of the talk, he says: . You have choices. Be a good steward. Negotiate…and keep a copy of the agreement. In fact, keep the agreement for the entire term of the copyright, i.e., 70 years after you’re dead.

Q: Google Books settlement?
A: Read the agreement. “It will really wow you.” The key point: It permits Google to continue scanning, and to create this “fantastically large, very useful archive of materials.” But access to it will be restricted. If a book’s in copyright, you can only get bibliographic info. If you want more, you sign up for a subscription. Tightly controlled, limited access. “And it’s a book selling situation.” Google and the association become major booksellers. You buy access, not copies. “The challenge for all of us is there is no question, this proposal should it become the legal standard, is the biggest, most important step toward digital access of materials not previous available.” We need to decide if we want to move into the future on these terms. “I only give this agreement several years before it falls apart” and they’re back in court looking for new terms.

Q: Robert Darnton: What kind of legislation should we have for orphan works [= works under copyright whose license holders cannot be found]
A: The Copyright Office’s legislative proposal from a few years ago was actually pretty good. But as it went through the process, “every change was a step backward.” “I thought it was a good thing the legislation died last year.” We’re in pretty good shape now with the Fair Use laws. The Google settlement allows the Registry to collect revenues from the use of works and distribute money out to the rights holders. But with an orphaned works, who gets it? The basic idea is that that money is used to pay organizational overhead. If there’s leftover money, 70% gets distributed to the class of known copyright holders. The other 30% goes into a pool for non-profits. “The serious problem is that it gives Google a monumental head start over anyone else in working with orphan works.” Competitors don’t have a court settlement that protects them from law suits over rights abuses. “This is a formidable problem with the agreement.”

Q: I edit an undergraduate Harvard journal. Authors sign over all rights to the journal. I worry about students being chagrined by their very first publication. Can an author ever get them back under wraps?
A: If I make something open access, can I reel it in if I change my mind? Legally, yes. Realistically, no. It’s probably been downloaded, mirrored, put into the Internet Archive.

Q: What about students’ lecture notes, etc.?
A: If everything created in a fixed medium is copyrighted, we have a responsibility to manage it. If you’re a student who created notes or papers, they’re yours. But, when it comes to wikis, etc., the copyright situation is nightmarish. It’s jointly copyrighted and owned. Any one student can exert rights.

Q: Every change in the copyright law has gotten awa from the original intent, which was to preserve creativity. The change to make everything copyrighted is nightmarish. Why not have a registry of copyright and require some action on the part of creators to get and renew a copyright?
A: So many ways I could respond! The US Constitution lists powers the Congress has. Most of those statements are very clear and simple. Then comes copyright: To promote progress in the sciences and useful arts, Congress has the power to granted limited-time rights to publish. It’s clear this has a purpose, a goal. There are many reasons we’ve gotten away from this. In addition to everthing else, the Berne Convention, which we joined in 1989, sets basic rules, including broad copyright with no formalities to get one. We couldn’t require registration to get a copyright without dropping out of Berne, but we’re locked into international provisions in multiple other agreements. You want change, go to Berne. [Tags: copyright copyleft google_books ]

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