Writing Teachers Writing New Media (Jerz’s CCCC 05 Notes)
“What did you guys do to earn walls?” -overheard during the (long) setup for this presentation.
Hoping to find an opportunity to continue the discussion of the intellectual property issues Lawrence Lessig raised on Thursday, I attended “Writing Teachers Writing New Media,” where three young presenters from The Ohio State University (Scott Lloyd DeWitt, Jason Palmeri, and another presenter filling in for Rita Rich — sorry, I didn’t catch his name) discussed the physical spaces in which their students created digital work, describing the ways they changed a writing lab in order to facilitate digital collaboration, and describing the resistance they encountered, as well as their successes.
I arrived a few minutes late, but the session actually didn’t get started for about another 10 minutes. The presenters wanted to have two screens going at once, one for a traditional electronic slideshow, and another to show student multimedia presentations. While it all worked out in the end, the beginning was very rocky.
The presenters spoke in glowing terms of the online archive of digital creativity their work produces, and were justifiably proud of their students’ contributions. I noticed that a few presentations gave credit to the original source of remixed material, but the presenters themselves did not address any copyright or intellectual property issues.
During the Q & A, I asked what steps they had taken in order to deal with intellectual property issues. The presenters admitted that they hadn’t been systematic about it. After learning that none of the presenters had attended Lessig’s talk, I mentioned a few of Lessig’s points, particularly his criticism of both extremes of the intellectual property debate.
A young woman sitting in front of me huffed, “Screw the motion picture industry!”
Though I presume that she had not attended Lessig’s talk either, her dismissive and naive attitude precisely illustrated what educators are up against. Lessig argued that extremism begets extremism – that the draconian efforts to control digital property spark equally extreme acts of defiance, and that neither extreme is a sensible, sustainable course of action.
When I taught Writing for the Internet last term, I let my students know that I expected them to cite all the material they took from other sources, but next time I think I might require them to use material that they scanned themselves from out-of-copyright sources, material that they can prove they’ve requested and received permission for use, or material with an appropriate creative common license.
While the “fair use” clause supports the use of copyrighted material for critical and satirical purposes, young people are so inundated by the committee-produced, financially-driven culture that dominates their televisions that perhaps it would be a good idea to encourage them to look at the creative commons, and instead of creating a work that remixes content that has been bought and paid for by Hollywood, instead remix the creative output of other people like them.
Danielle, thanks for the clarification.
Scott, I certainly didn’t mean to suggest that the only thing worth talking about is intellectual property.
One reason I blogged all this stuff here, and why I spoke with Ben afterwards, was becuase I could tell from the questions from the audience that many people did want to talk about spaces, so I didn’t try to offer a follow-up question to the “screw the motion picture industry” comment.
I remember that you ended your presentation on time, noting that you didn’t want anyone else to suffer what had happened to you. That struck me as being very generous. I should have mentioned that.
Thanks, Dennis, for your comments on our Cs presentation. A few things I want to add to the conversation.
First, yes, we did fall slightly behind getting started. As you note, you were a few minutes late, so you didn’t see that the presentation before us ran about 12 minutes over, which gave us approximately 3 minutes to set up if we were to be on time. Throw into the mix a projector that was provided for us that couldn’t handle the resolution of my PowerBook, and that we were working with two laptops, two projectors, audio, and handouts in a room that we had never stepped foot in before the presentation . . . .I’m not so sure I would call our start all that “rocky.”
(I was trying to listen in on your conversation with Ben after the presentation, but I was wanted to make sure that we didn’t put the next panel behind schedule, and breaking down all that equipment takes just as long as it does to set up.)
Also, as you note, you had attended our presentation “hoping to find an opportunity to continue the discussion of the intellectual property issues Lawrence Lessig raised on Thursday.” Clearly, Lessig gave people much to think about. I heard his name at the conference for 48-hours following his presentation. I wish I would have attended. I’m sorry our presentation didn’t fulfill your desire to continue conversations about intellectual property, and I don’t mean to be rude at all by suggesting this, I really don’t, but . . . our presentation wasn’t about intellectual property. When we have one hour and fifteen minute (minus ten, as you pointed out), we can’t cover what we feel is a very important topic–creating spaces for teachers’ new media production–and give intellectual property issues any kind of meaningful attention. It just can’t be done. My response to your question during the Q&A was not particularly interesting, nor did I do a very good job at conveying my thinking about those issues. I guess I just didn’t want to talk about intellectual property after the presentation we gave. I get frustrated when intellectual property and plagiarism/authorship trump everything else we need to talk about. They are important, pressing issues. They are HUGE issues. People feel very passionate about them. We should talk about them often at these conferences. Clearly, with Lessig attending the conference, that topic is on the map. However, I didn’t see anywhere else on the conference program where people were talking about creating spaces for writing teachers to write new media. I suppose I just wanted people to spend an hour and five minutes (and maybe a little longer when they returned home) thinking about something WE feel very passionate about.
Two other very quick notes:
1. Indeed, some of the students’ work did not cite source material. Often, we stopped playing these projects before they were finished (or we didn’t choose a link that showed citation material). Often, those citations were included on a CD/DVD of their work that wasn’t shown in its entirety.
2. What did we do to earn walls? It was just a luck of the draw, I’m afraid. After attending a couple presentations in the tent village . . . .MAN am I happy that we had walls.
Scott
I’m the “young woman” in the audience. I’m also a technorhetorician, and also consider myself an intellectual property activist.
What really, really concerns me — and what scaffolds my somewhat flippant comment — is when teachers begin censoring student work. Students in my courses construct rich, multimedia work that I think falls SQUARELY under fair use.
Do we talk about intellectual property issues in my classes? Yes, but I don’t threaten students and I certainly try not to frighten students, and I also note that the WHOLE REASON why copyright exists is to CIRCULATE and SHARE ideas for the public good.
So, when the MPAA frightens students or makes students hesitate when borrowing and using work for informative, educational, or satirical purposes, yeah, SCREW ’em.
Danielle
Thanks for the link, Ben. Yes, it was about time! I’ll look at it when things calm down.
Hmm… I really do have “screw” in my notes, but perhaps I censored it even then!
URL disappeared from previous post:
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/03/21/ourmedia_unlimited_h.html
The anonymous third party of the presentation here. I really enjoyed our conversation afterwards. I’ve been giving some thought to the idea of having a more formalized response to the issues related to dealing with incorporated digital media within our little corner of the department. Your comments about creating an all-CC repository really caught my ear, and I found it a happy coincidence that OurMedia.org launched today (and promptly got slashdotted, boingboinged, and gizmodoed into submission). Here’s the BoingBoing link, since the site itself is down:
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/03/21/ourmedia_unlimited_h.html
Also, let me second your sentiment: it is HUGE that Lessig came to CCCC; his presence shows that the work we do (as modest teachers and scholars of composition, etc.) is integral to the issues of copyright and intellectual property in the public sphere. I only wish that travel difficulties hadn’t kept me from his talk.
By the way, I noticed that you took a little editorial liberty with the young lady’s MPAA comment (probably for the sake of decorum). ;)