abject learning

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Disney Institute — Steamboat Willie Says Take Risks, originally uploaded by royblumenthal.

Another week, yet another round of copyright news that moves from simply absurd into the realm of the truly frightening.

Canada has seen the re-launch of previously rebuffed copyright legislation, now known as Bill C-61. I’ll leave the detailed analysis to Michael Geist, but there’s so much I find depressing about this law and the attendant process that I really don’t know where to begin. I’m saddened that our government has ignored the voices of Canadian creators and (naturally) consumers, short-circuiting the consultation process that was promised… I’m disturbed that federal policymakers are clearly prepared to handcuff innovation to appease a handful of large corporate interests intent on preserving an inefficient business model. I despair that opposition in our House of Commons (which has backed down on so many other issues) will not amount to much, and that the citizenry will not see this as a serious issue (Geist disagrees)… The whole episode seems to confirm the direst predictions of Canadian nationalists who warned that tighter economic integration with our friends to the south would undermine our sovereignty, even on cultural issues. As Marc Lee of the CCPA points out, Canada is already running a hefty deficit in ‘cultural services’…

The educational implications of this Bill are classic bait-and-switch:

Bill C-61 creates for schools (but not others) a new special exemption from copyright, for PAM (publicly available material). If you are a school, you can just take and use stuff you find on the internet; the usual presumption of respect for the work of others is waived. Then it hedges this privilege to plunder with complications. Not if it’s under a TPM (a digital lock). Not if the school “should have known” it’s made available without the owner’s consent. And not if the creator has attached to the work a notice saying “schools, no plundering please.”

…It’s as if the drafters of C-61 are telling us, don’t make your work available, don’t provide access. Lock it up. Hedge it about with warnings, threats, and notices. And if you don’t, it’s your own fault.

And at the same time it is telling users, even privileged ones like schools, that copyright will be an endless headache for them, that compliance will always be difficult and time-consuming and fraught with uncertainty.

Now I direct your attention to a new policy from the Associated Press that demands payment from bloggers for quoting as few as five words from an article:

Welcome to a world in which you won’t be able to effectively criticize the press, because you’ll be required to pay to quote as few as five words from what they publish.

Welcome to a world in which you won’t own any of your technology or your music or your books, because ensuring that someone makes their profit margins will justify depriving you of the even the most basic, commonsensical rights in your personal, hand-level household goods.

(If that last paragraph seems hysterical, consider the poor saps who played by the rules and rented — while they thought they were purchasing — files from MSN Music.)

More from D’Arcy, who has started up a lively discussion in the comments on whether EduBloggers might capitalise on the AP policy by working as digital rights bounty hunters…

See also this video on Copyright Criminals, one in which Alec Couros expands his dramatic range from his usual typecasted fare…

My natural pessimism aside, there is one truth I take away from all of this. Those of us who work in education and public research have no choice but to embrace open distribution and licensing models. I don’t see how we can continue to hand over control of our work to entities that profit from selling it back to us… It’s clear how that narrative plays out.

I write this sitting in a mostly-empty auditorium, the technical checks for David Wiley’s virtual keynote completed, hoping things go smoothly, as I’m the putative moderator on this end. I’m looking forward to hearing what David has to say for a number of reasons, not least of which is that I have been reusing a version of the talk he gave last year in Vancouver ever since, and I could use some fresh material.

And wrapping up the day it will be my privilege to co-present with Jon Beasley-Murray and Wyeth Wasserman for a session entitled Academic Adventures in Wikipedia. Both these guys have done some very impressive work with their students, and I’m very excited about the session.

As an aside, I finally broke through my diffidence and started my first Wikipedia article yesterday, made a few other signed edits as well… but that’s another blog post.

I had resolved to give the Edupunk thing a rest, lest I uncork a rant on the differences between “a metaphor” and “a movement” or offer up patronizing tips on how to tell if someone is having a bit of fun.

But Martin Weller’s response to Tony Hirst’s video is too funny for me to ignore. Watch it in full-screen mode, and for the second straight day I’m happy to urge you to crank the sucker:

I’ve never met Martin, but I bet he would look awesome in leather pants.

In all sincerity, seeing someone based in Cardiff assemble something with such clever references as well as funny nods to the social dimension of our scene… it brings home to me that not only do I work in a fascinating and dynamic field, we get to have big time fun as well. Not to be taken for granted.

In addition to being the living embodiment of data literacy in learning, Tony Hirst has done some mad stuff in the past, be it an epic manifesto concerning RSS and learning, or this hilarious diplomatic missive to Tom and Jim’s People’s Republic of Non-Programmistan. But I daresay he’s outdone himself with ‘changing user expectations: finding and using content’, which is a five minute blast of online presentation bliss.

I’ll be interested to see if others respond as enthusiastically as I do – it’s so wired in to where my head is at these days, both in terms of the big picture (opening up, transformation, disaggregation) and the details (syndication, embed code). And while I’ve never been much of an Oasis fan, the choice of music (and the way the lyrics weave into the message) is absolutely killer. I’ll have to give those Gallagher boys another listen.

The original .swf file is here (28 MB) – but it was slow for me to load, so I am grateful for Andre taking the time to convert it to a blip.tv friendly format (shareware, apologies for introductory watermark crawl). Anyhow, just take the five minutes and watch the damn thing, and (I’m very pleased to add) be sure to crank it up loud!

It goes fast, so you may miss the quotation from Macbeth:

Time, thou anticipatest my dread exploits.
The flighty purpose never is o’ertook
Unless the deed go with it. From this moment
The very firstlings of my heart shall be
The firstlings of my hand. And even now,
To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done

My guess is that Tony’s saying it’s time to get out there and do it.

…so I got a real kick when Rick Schwier invoked Abbie Hoffman in his edupunk post. Which reminded me of this riff from Steal This Book:

Too many college radicals are two-timing punks. The only reason you should be in college is to destroy it. If there is stuff that you want to learn though, there is a way to get a college education absolutely free. Simply send away for the schedule of courses at the college of your choice. Make up the schedule you want and audit the classes. In smaller classes this might be a problem, but even then, if the teacher is worth anything at all, he’ll let you stay. In large classes, no one will ever object. [My emphasis, with apologies for the sexist hippie language.]

I’ll get back to the ‘destroying college’ part in a moment. But it seems all too easy and all too relevant to ponder what Hoffman suggests about auditing classes for free and consider how online environments change the equation. If you are an educator, are you really prepared to withhold learning from someone just because they can’t pay for it, or because they haven’t been approved by some admissions process? And does the fact that you can share what you do without any extra effort whatsoever (‘in large classes, no one will ever object’) mean anything to you?

I admit to a sense of wonder mixed with unease watching a provocative and inspiring series of posts on edupunk from Jim Groom (starting here) exploding through our corner of the blogosphere. Speaking for myself, I’m a middle-aged family man with a fantastic job at a university, and higher education is something I want to play a small part in strengthening and reinvigorating, not in destroying. If I were to explicitly adopt the label I’d feel a bit like one of those ‘two-timing punks’ that Hoffman derides. (That’s not meant to criticize others who feel differently, many of them are among my favorite people anywhere.)

But reading the many posts, pro and con, that have so rapidly proliferated has me asking questions about how we practice this profession.

* Are you troubled by how power and money are manifested in society, not to mention our classrooms and our educational institutions? Do you feel like the human race can continue as it is?

* Do you think that learning is a basic human right function? Are practices that gratuitously withdraw learning into a circumscribed domain apart from the rest of the world inhumane and counter-productive?

* Are you committed to practices that place as much power in the hands of individuals as possible, while making sharing and collaboration as easy as possible? How much of what we presently license out are we already able to do ourselves?

I don’t have an acid test for how those questions must be answered. But if you are engaging those issues honestly and directly, then I want to party with you. And I don’t care if its EduPunk or EduStringQuartet that defines the aesthetic.

My characteristic discomfort with labels aside, the explosion of posts on edupunk demonstrates that people want to ask the kinds of question I raise above. People are asking themselves if they are resisting or reinforcing dangerous tendencies, discussing that honestly with their peers, and I’m very much heartened by that. Edupunk must die! Long live edupunk!

BONUS! This whole phenomenon has led someone to suggest that me and my friends are immature thugs with fascist (maybe even latent Nazi) leanings. I guess that makes us Brownhoodies. I’m reasonably sure this is the first time my work has been associated with Nazism, however indirectly. This from the same fellow who says we seek to ‘infantilize’ discussion via hyperbole. (Check out Stephen and Bill respond.)

As for “perpetual adolescence and self-indulgence”… where’s the party?

** Many thanks to Serena for her fine work messing with the image above!

[Multiple warnings apply. This may not be the longest post I’ve ever written, but it certainly sets a personal record for embedded media bits. Since I only link to existing song files, it is quite likely much of this linkage will soon be gone. And being a history of punk, plenty of what gets linked below the jump would qualify as in dubious taste, or as outright obscenity.]

Now this is a learning object. Jeffrey Lewis sings the evolution of punk from its origins in the darkest regions of American folk right through to its explosion in popular consciousness, situated against the backdrop of New York City’s Lower East Side.

I have plenty to say and link about Lewis’ “History of Punk on the Lower East Side”, but before I do, give his track a listen, it’s a little under ten minutes long.

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	Jeffrey Lewis – The History of Punk on the Lower East Side
	Found at skreemr.com

If you prefer, there’s also a version of the surprisingly youthful Lewis doing it up on YouTube.

I have more — a lot more — elaboration of this wondrous slice of musical history after the jump…
[In the time it took me to listen to the 9:40 of Lewis’ “History”, I was able to assemble this Seeqpod playlist, which you may prefer to listen to in shuffle mode and skip my pedestrian commentary. It’s got a quite a few tracks not referenced below. I’ll embed the player at the end of the post.]

Lewis traces the origins of punk to the landmark 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, a truly incredible collection of tracks, one that feels canonical and underground all at once. The music was originally issued between 1927 (the year electronic recording allowed for decent reproduction) and 1932 (when the Depression finally obliterated the market for buying it). The anthology is widely acknowledged to have been a huge influence on the folk music revival of the 1950’s and 1960’s.

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	Clarence Ashley – The Coo Coo Bird
	Found at skreemr.com

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	Buell Kazee – East Virginia
	Found at skreemr.com

Harry Smith is best known as an archivist and ethnomusicologist (in Lewis’ terms a bohemian freak with a monstrous vinyl collection) but as his Wikipedia entry and dedicated archival website reveal, he was arguably more famous with the avant-garde crowd as an experimental filmmaker. He was also a shaker in occult circles, described by Kenneth Anger as “the greatest living magician.” Now that’s a diverse career.

Next up are the Holy Modal Rounders who took the darker currents of old timey folk and brought it squarely into the context of New York City freakdom. The incomparable Oook alerts us to the Bound to Lose documentary, with a truly twisted trailer. (Was SAM SHEPHERD really their drummer?)

Their weirdest material from later in their career doesn’t seem to be readily available on the open web, but here’s a taste:

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	Holy Modal Rounders – Euphoria
	Found at skreemr.com

And this was the closest they ever got to a hit, probably because it was featured on the Easy Rider soundtrack:

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	The Holy Modal Rounders – If You Wnt To Be A Bird
	Found at skreemr.com

Next up in the narrative is an early incarnation of the Velvet Underground, who do typically get credit as an early precursor of punk music. They certainly strike me as one of the best examples of ‘poor’ technique nonetheless yielding wildly original and enduring sound:

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	The Velvet Underground – Run Run Run
	Found at skreemr.com

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	The Velvet Underground – Beginning to See the Light
	Found at skreemr.com

I once had a Philosophy professor who had been on the front lines of the sixties counterculture in California, and when pressed he would reluctantly drip a few anecdotes my way. He turned me on to The Fugs. Sad to say the message of these tracks have aged pretty well:

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	Fugs – CIA Man
	Found at skreemr.com

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	The Fugs – Kill For Peace
	Found at skreemr.com

I find The Godz harder to listen to than anything else listed here, though I like some scattered bits. Just one selection from them:

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	The Godz – Walking Guitar Blues
	Found at skreemr.com

David Peel was completely unknown to me before his star turn in Lewis’ “History”. He is a study in contrasts, the inner city hippie, the peacenik who indulges violent confrontational fantasies. And his take on the Lower East Side may be the first explicit expression of NYC punkdom.

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	David Peel And The Lower East Side – ‘The Lower East Side’
	Found at skreemr.com

Peel recorded his early records on NYC street corners, and even after he got a record deal and an album produced by John Lennon (if you see a vinyl copy of “The Pope Smokes Dope” pick it up for me, willya?) he kept his street-based persona. I saw one busker clip of him on YouTube, now removed, that was clearly from the past few years, and he is full of hilarious fury. This video of Peel’s answer song to “Okie from Muskogee” backed up by John, Yoko, et al… is a hoot:

On first listen, Silver Apples seem an odd fit in this history, but it’s worth remembering that NYC rock at CBGB’s wasn’t just the Ramones, it was also the Talking Heads. Some of their stuff sounds shockingly contemporary to my ears. My favorite track by them (“You and I”) isn’t online, but this is probably a better sample anyway:

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	Silver Apples – Oscillations
	Found at skreemr.com

The Stooges were from Detroit, but whatever, their sound did change when they moved to NYC, and it’s hard to imagine telling this story without them:

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	Iggy Pop and The Stooges – 1969
	Found at skreemr.com

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	The Stooges – No fun
	Found at skreemr.com

Jac Holzman and Lenny Kaye’s anthology of 60’s psychedelic rock Nuggets may have been as influential in its own way as Harry Smith’s folk collection. Oooo, would I like a vinyl copy of it! It’s near impossible just to pick a couple tracks:

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	The Count Five – Psychotic Reaction
	Found at skreemr.com

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	The Strangeloves – I Want Candy
	Found at skreemr.com

One of the producers of the above Nuggets anthology went on to play guitar for Patti Smith — whose best work is woefully absent from semi-legal online sources:

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	Patti Smith – Gloria
	Found at skreemr.com

I love how Lewis characterizes the New York Dolls — as one of the first groups who made stupid seem like the new smart. This was the first song to get me into them, when I heard it performed by a cover band in Tucson:

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	New York Dolls – Pills
	Found at skreemr.com

There’s a wonderful exchange about that song when Dolls’ singer David Johansen actually stumps legendary Vancouver DJ Nardwuar the Human Serviette (who really deserves a blog post of his own) in this funny 2006 interview. We learn that “Pills” was itself a cover of a Bo Diddley song, and yes, Skreemr has the original. It ain’t exactly punk history, but I just gotta include it:

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	Bo Diddley – Pills
	Found at skreemr.com

Lewis’ “History” kind of careens to its conclusion from here, and thank goodness, as I’m sure that if you’re still clicking through this post that you’ve had more than enough. Before he wraps, he namechecks Richard Hell, Television (they played CBGB’s but featuring some truly epic guitar work), and fittingly he ends where many might have begun, with The Ramones:

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	Richard Hell & The Voidoids – Blank Generation
	Found at skreemr.com

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	Television – Marquee Moon
	Found at skreemr.com

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	Ramones – Blitzkrieg Bop
	Found at skreemr.com

As threatened, this hastily assembled accompanying Seeqpod playlist. If you can point to additional or superior tracks to what is here, drop me a line — I’d like to hone this collection in the coming weeks into the ultimate online companion to the History of NYC Punk.

SeeqPod – Playable Search

Update: Changed link to Cindy’s presentation to reflect a newer version.

For reasons I don’t entirely understand, I spent ten minutes of my vacation whipping up this screencast that describes some of UBC’s Office of Learning Technology’s work in progress toward a distributed publishing framework:

Links here.

Some additional context might be gleaned from this short set of slides assembled by my colleague Cindy Underhill.

Essentially, we are seeing how far we can push the concepts of syndication to extend reuse of content. And showing our undying love of embed code.

As an entirely relevant aside, I see that Stephen Downes’ long-awaited release of gRSShopper is here! I hope we can get the sucker installed on a demo box here soon.

And the MuTags plugin written up here by Edupunk legend Jim Groom might also be a worthy piece of the puzzle.

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Comeback Kid, originally uploaded by glamourously.

I’ve been away in Conferenceland and on vacation the past few weeks. I return to overflowing RSS and email in-flows, and plunge directly into the howling maw that is the BC Educational Technology User’s Group 2008 workshop, this year themed on creativity.

I’m on tap to discoordinate an open session for people to play with digital media. I suspect the activity will consist of me sitting alone in a computer lab while the participants eat lunch and drink coffee elsewhere. Perhaps I’m wrong, but if it does indeed play out that way maybe I’ll get a little blogging done.

OK, what did I miss while I was away?

Neil Young has long been a standard-bearer in the anti-digital music brigades. So it’s truly remarkable to see how enthusiastically he has embraced Blu-ray technology, going so far as to take part in one of those fancy digital wonderland presentations (scroll down for video).

A few notable elements of this video:

* Although highly critical of the sound quality of CDs (as he is in the clip), he offers an unqualified endorsement of Blu-ray’s range. Neil’s fans understand how deeply he feels the dynamics of electrified sound (the biography Shakey relates an anecdote where Neil was able to detect transient fluctuations in a studio electrical system just by sound variations that nobody else was noticing), so this really is something.

* The format allows Neil’s vast catalog and stores of unreleased materials to be released in a breadth and depth that would previously have been impossible. The music will be paired with images, video and textual artifacts. The video features a pretty snazzy demo.

* The release of this Archives project has been rumoured since his greatest hits collection Decade was released more than 30 years ago. There have been numerous near-releases, but each time the project has made progress Neil has shelved it for various reasons, most likely because the product did not live up to Neil’s vision. I suspect the ability for the discs to be updated via Java after they’ve been released and purchased was a big reason why he finally feels comfortable with releasing the archives.

It’ll be interesting to see how the collection is received, how it evolves, and how the pirates will respond.

And yeah, I’m looking forward to hearing some music.

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Granville Island, Vancouver, originally uploaded by Alan Stanton.

A quick post to let those here in British Columbia know that the 2008 Educational Technology User’s Group Spring Workshop, May 28-30, is featuring the theme of creativity this year. Appropriately, the venue is the Emily Carr Institute for Art + Design on Vancouver’s Granville Island (a favorite spot for locals and tourists alike, designated by the Project for Public Spaces as “One of the World’s Great Places”).

I had the chance to meet with the organizers and see the venue last week, and was most impressed. The planners are determined to try something new and provocative, and based on what I heard I think this will be a very fun and worthwhile event.

Throughout the workshop I will be conducting an ongoing experiment on getting the participants to create mashup artifacts — probably with a few tools drawn from Alan’s epic 50 Ways project. Scott will be at the meeting too, and I’m hoping to enlist him as a co-conspirator.