I’m on there, here’s my podcasts and ebooks. They include a recorded talk about my research on the student digital experience and 5 years of blog posts available as an ebook.
In April this year I was delighted to welcome one of Oxford’s top podcasters, Dr Emma Smith to keynote at OER16. I first met Emma around the time we were launching Oxford on ItunesU. She is a Fellow of Hertford College and Professor of Shakespeare Studies. She was one of the first academic colleagues to champion the use and creation of OER at University of Oxford through her involvement in the Jisc funded Open Spires and Great Writers Inspire projects. Her OER licensed lectures reach an international audience and she continues to produce, publish and share cultural resources online.
After some early Jisc funding in 2009 Oxford’s podcasts collection quickly became one of the largest growing collections of openly licenced university lectures online. Oxford podcasts have published nearly 10,000 thousand audio and video items. 50% of this content is CC licenced. It includes 6,000 individual speakers and presenters. More than 23 million episodes have been downloaded. 10 million episodes have been streamed.
Emma was one of the first of the Oxford podcasters and the first major contributor to record podcasts herself. She has published 48 episodes which are part of 7 different series. Her biggest successes are ‘Approaching Shakespeare’ and ‘Not Shakespeare’.
Approaching Shakespeare has had more that 500,000 thousand downloads and regularly features in the itunesU global top ten.
Emma’s podcasts are only a small part of her work, but whenever I hear discussions about open academic practice I think of colleagues like Emma at Oxford who share so generously, but always with a wise, and enquiring eye to what might happen as a result.
Writing this post is reminding me of the connection between podcasting, recording and lecture capture…..ing,
You may wonder why Media Hopper is called Media Hopper. You will know the following definitions of hopper:
hopper ( agric) : a container for a loose bulk material. hopper ( minecraft ): a block that can be used to catch item entities, or to transfer items into and out of other containers. channel-hopper( tv) : quickly changing from one channel to another to find something you want to watch. Grace Hopper ( rolemodel) : an inspirational computer scientist. She developed the implementation of standards for testing computer systems and components and coined the term “debugging” for fixing computer glitches when she removed a moth from her computer. Dennis Hopper (role model): just cool. space hopper ( toy ): just orange and bouncy.
As I was explaining to Vicki, our Digital Recruitment and Marketing intern just the other day, Media Hopper gathers together all the mixed up multitude of video material from all over the University; brings it into one place; channels it into our VLEs, websites, portals and courses; applies standards and metadata is very cool.
I think it’s important to name things after inspirational women when you can, and Grace Hopper fits the bill for me.
Vicki will now be using videos in Media Hopper to liven up our LinkedIn presence.
Open practice in action. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:University_of_Edinburgh_Spy_Week_Wikipedia_edit-a-thon_02.jpgThing 12 of our 23 things is OER.
I talk a lot about OER. Last week I was talking about it in Barcelona, this week I’m talking about it in Paris, in two weeks I’ll be in Berlin. I also write a bit about OER. On this blog and occasionally for case studies and articles. My work in creating a culture of openness is featured as a case study by OEPS. At the moment my homework is to write a case study for Gill and Fred to include in their new book.
I am also pleased to be able to make the case for new posts based on our institutional commitment to open. We have had support to extend contracts for our OER Adviser and our Wikimedian in Residence. We have also just signed a memorandum of understanding with the National Library at a time when they are working to open up huge swathes of their collections.
The task is to find OER to use in my work. I enjoy finding OER to use in my blog and presentations. Other OER I use in my work tend to be the OER about OER such as:
Paying lip service to innovation. Picture taken by me at the Gartner Expo. No rights reserved by me.
In a post-truth world what can we say? I sit in rooms where we discuss what learners should have, based on our best thinking about what kind of learning is good for them. They don’t want it. They want Brexit and Trump and passive learning with no hard exams. 10 million MOOC fans can’t be wrong.
We are lucky to be able to learn from best practice at other institutions. The excellent Jane Secker ( UK Copyright Literacy) has been doing some research to find out what the issues are. She has surveyed UK HE institutions.
The position regarding copyright ownership is enshrined in statute – the Copyright Designs and Patent Act 1988. Section 11(2) provides that copyright created in the course of an individual’s employment vests in the employer. Often this statutory right is backed up with provision in a contract of employment but our University of Edinburgh standard contracts are not explicit in this regard. As a result academic colleagues can sometimes be a bit surprised by this.
I expect we will need to support our colleagues with advice something like this ( adpated from Birkbeck)
Can I use copyright material in my lectures?
You may sometimes wish to use copyright work (e.g. an image, video clip or piece of text) belonging to another person or organisation in the course of your teaching. The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988) currently states that copying for educational purposes is permitted, so long as it is not undertaken by a mechanical process. This essentially means you cannot scan, photocopy, or record (using lecture capture) copyright works without explicit permission from the owner.
In terms of lecture recordings, your options are as follows:
Pause the recorder
Edit the recording later
Provide links to the relevant material instead
Use Open Educational Resources (OER)
Just record audio
Are there exceptions that would allow copyright works to be used?
Showing a video, such as a clip from a film and playing music is permitted under the law, so long as it is solely for the purposes of education and the lecture is not recorded.
Similarly, you can use small amounts of copyright material for the purposes of ‘criticism and review.’ Clearly, good practice requires acknowledging your sources, and stating where it is being used for criticism and review. In this case the work can be included in a recorded lecture.
What am I allowed to include in a recorded lecture?
The Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) Higher Education Licence allows small amounts of published copyright works (books and journals) to be copied for teaching purposes. This includes illustrations and images within the works.
In addition, if material that you find online is licensed under Creative Commons (CC) – a less restrictive form of copyright – then you will be able to show this material in a lecture that is being recorded. Again, the source should be acknowledged.
What about material from YouTube?
The copyright in material that you might show from sites such as YouTube lies with the creator of the video, so you would need to obtain permission directly from them (YouTube cannot grant this on their behalf). Some of these materials may be available for educational use or under a CC licence. Although it is permissible to show these recordings for educational purposes, and to provide links to the material, you should exclude this content from a recorded lecture. This can be done by pausing the recording whilst the clip is being played.
Although easy to download, online images are frequently subject to some sort of copyright, and unless you own the copyright yourself, it is usually NOT legal or acceptable to download them and use them in your recorded lectures.
There are several ways that you can legally use images in your recorded lectures:
Use images where their copyright has expired
Many sites e.g. Flickr, allow you to use images under a Creative Commons (CC) licence – all CC licences mean the copyright owner must be attributed.
Contact your Subject Librarian – they will be able to sign post CC subject specific image sources
Create your own
Obtain permission to use them from the copyright holder
What about other cases when you can show material you don’t own in lectures?
There are several other instances when you can use copyright material, including:
When the copyright period in the material has expired
When University of Edinburgh owns the copyright of the material e.g. publicity material, other learning and teaching resources produced by the University.
When you have specific copyright clearance ( under licence via the Library) to use the materials in this way.
What are the risks associated with using copyright material?
You are responsible for making sure that your recorded lectures do not infringe copyright. University of Edinburgh, however, is at risk of prosecution for infringing copyright, either within recorded lectures, or by uploading materials to a VLE, public folders, or another website.
Although it may be legal to use these materials within a class, it does not necessarily make it legal to include them within a recorded lecture and/or upload these to a VLE.
The University is targeting an improved student digital experience by investing several million pounds in a state-of-the-art lecture recording system to cover 400 rooms in over the next 3 years.
We want to make sure that your thoughts and ideas on lecture recording are gathered so they can be used during our investigations with suppliers. Having your thoughts included within the process will make sure we make the most of this opportunity to enhance the experience for students and academics at the University of Edinburgh.
The ability to watch lectures again as an aid to revision is immensely popular with our students already and capturing video and audio recordings of lectures at scale will supplement the rich set of online resources that already exist to support learning.
There are many proven benefits to making recordings of lectures available including supporting students for whom English is not a first language and ensuring that our face to face lectures are available in an alternative format for students who require it. Not having to take notes at speed allows students to focus more on what is being said and use valuable contact time to ask questions, knowing that notes can be reviewed and improved later.
We have created 18 use cases for lecture recording. We want you to look at these use cases and think ‘how should this work?’ We want you to think of this in terms of usability and your workflows when using the service.
The creation of policy around lecture recording at this scale will form a separate piece of work, these workshops are about the functionality.
We also want you to tell us which use cases are your priority.
Finally, ‘what are we missing?’ We want you to suggest any use cases not covered.
Picture taken of me at #ald16eduni . No rights reserved by me.
Back in the days of Web 2.0 we used to describe things as ‘perpetualy beta‘. For me this perfectly describes Wikipedia. It’ll never be finished: we must add to, and improve it, early and often. Users are co-developers and it’s developed under open source principles of collective intelligence.
Yesterday I wrote a provocation piece for the Dangerous Women Project. Today a bunch of colleagues and students engaged in dangerous practice and we were featured on the telly. I’m the one wearing the Creative Commons badge.
Picture taken by me in the street of a Calum Colvin artwork. No rights reserved by me.
Since we are thinking about Twitter on ‘23 things for digital knowledge‘ and we have learned about privacy, and we have read our social media guidelines and we are going to learn about copyright and OER; I thought it was worth having a good look at the Twitter Terms of Service.
I note in the first point: ‘ If you are accepting these Terms and using the Services on behalf of a company, organization, government, or other legal entity, you represent and warrant that you are authorized to do so.‘ I wonder, if we tweet from a work account, has our university/dept authorised us to tweet on its behalf?
On privacy: ‘You understand that through your use of the Services you consent to the collection and use (as set forth in the Privacy Policy) of this information, including the transfer of this information to the United States, Ireland, and/or other countries for storage, processing and use by Twitter and its affiliates.’ Good thing we understand our privacy settings.
On copyright: ‘By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).’ The right to reproduce, adapt, modify, distribute. That’s a lotta license!
Picture taken by me of a window in Budapest. No rights reserved by me.
I am participating in the University of Edinburgh digital skills course ‘23 things for digital knowledge‘. Thing 6 is about accessibility. I was listening on Radio 4 to ‘tweet of the day’ this morning while scrolling through Twitter and I mused on the possibility of having tweets actually tweeted, as in spoken outloud. A quick google search revealed instructions on Instructables on how to make it so.
.jpg)
