blogs

Learning with blogs?

After the summer I will teach my course in Computer Ethics at the University of Göteborg. The course tends to cover the typical areas of computer ethics (integrity, property, harmful content, community etc etc). The main problem is getting the students to â??getâ?? that technology has an ethical dimension.

Once the students realise that there is an ethical dimension or problem they tend to react very enthusiastically.

In order to help them â??get itâ?? I am planning something a bit different. I want to get the students blogging and have a minimum requirement of posts in the area we will be covering. The basic idea is that the students will have to find, adapt and post information. Hopefully this process will engage and awaken the students interest.

So I am looking for input:

Does anyone have any similar experience of this?
How successful was it?
What were the pitfalls and strengths?

All feedback will be appreciated…

Posted on by mklang

Will blog for cash (and even for free)

Actually I am sceptical to the idea of making money from blogging. In a previous post on the Blogburst I reported about the downsides of commercial feeds (they eat your broadband, usually you dont get more readers, and payment is virtually nil). Obviously there are the exceptions to the rule. In the same way as Madonna makes money from selling records is an exception from the thousands (hundreds of thousands?) who never will.

Dont get me wrong – I am not against money per se. I just dont believe that I will make money directly from my blog. Despite this, I found this news interesting.

Scoopt, the world’s first commercial citizen journalism photography agency, has just launched ScooptWords to help bloggers sell their content to newspapers and magazines. Within the Scoopt interface, you can easily add a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license to your blog right alongside a Scoopt commercial badge. Use the CC license to tell people how your work can be used non-commercially; use the ScooptWords badge to let editors know that your writing can be purchased for commercial use. There’s so much great blog content being created every day — it’ll be very exciting to see how it helps change the way newspapers and magazines are created.

(via Creative Commons)

The attempts to create commercial forms of citizen journalism are fascinating to watch. Again we see the new social uses of media threatening the established business models. Blogs will not kill print media but they will force print media news to adapt to a new reality.  As usual in situations such as these there will be commercial winners and losers.

Posted on by mklang

Freelancers & Copyright

My last post was an attempt to blog via mail but it was less than successful since all that was posted was the header. I obviously have a lot to learn in this area. The post was supposed to include this text:
Today I am attending the Nordic Seminar for Freelance Journalists. This year it is being held in Kungälv at a conference center with a great view of Bohus Fästning (Bohus Fortress). The whole event is between Friday and Sunday but I am here to talk about Creative Commons licensing for the intellectual property slot on Friday afternoon.

Bohus Fortress

The IP block begins with a discussion on recent caselaw which is followed by a presentation called the archaeology of copyright. After a short coffee break I will present Creative Commons licenses and the session closes with a presentation of the Nordic and European Union rules of Copyright. This sounds like an interesting way to spend the afternoon even if it seems like summer has finally arrived.

It will be interesting to hear first hand from the point of view of freelance journalists their views on copyright and hopefully we will even discuss the influence such technology as blogs.

I was concerned that the freelance journalists would not take well to CC but I could not have been more wrong. Their major concern is that their work can be (and often is) “stolen”, in addition to the need to be better at negotiating for payments for the online use of their work by their print media customers.

They often spoke of their concern for their reputation and themselves as trademarks – in particular their concern that online publication in forms that they could not predict may seriously damage their future work.

We had a very good discussion and the response was positive.

Posted on by mklang

Bloggers & Law

While in the USA the Sixth District Court of Appeals on Friday defended (.pdf, via Wired) blogger rights to protect their sources. The case concerned Apple who claimed that the bloggers were not acting as journalists when they posted internal documents on future Apple products online. The court writes that the law is “…intended to protect the gathering and dissemination of news…” and therefore it is not necessary to attempt to define the border between journalists and bloggers.

A Swedish case in 2001 (“Ramsbro” B 293-00) arrived at a similar conclusion (in Swedish). Here (pdf) is an unofficial translation of judgement by Bertil Wennergren, former justice of the Swedish Supreme Administrative Court (via Swedish Helsinki Committee for Human Rights). In this case it was an “ordinary” web page and not a blog but the conclusion was that the activity of informing the public was what defined journalism and not whether or not this activity was conducted by accredited journalists or newspapers.

This is naturally an important step on the way to defining the legal position of bloggers but it remains a small step on a long road…

Posted on by mklang

Did you miss it too?

Today (May, 25) was international towel day. The day is celebrated for being 42 days after the anniversary of Douglas Adams death. To commemorate the day and to remember Douglas – carry a towel…
I missed it – again…

Why towel day? Shame on you for displaying such ignorance. But in the aid of your further education:

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value – you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you – daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Towel Day 2006 – Innsbruck

So long and thanks for all the fish, Douglas…

Posted on by mklang

Elephants Dream

Licensed under the Creative Commons license and created by using open source tools the animated short “Elephants Dream” is now ready for download. The movie and production files are licensed under “Creative Commons Attribution 2.5”, which only requires a proper crediting for public screening, re-using and distribution.

 

 

“Elephants Dream” is the result of almost a year of work, a project initiated and coordinated by the Blender Foundation. Six people from the Blender user/development community were selected to come over to Amsterdam to work together on an animated short movie, utilizing Open Source tools only.

More information about the film here.

(via Free the Mind)

Posted on by mklang

The Covers

So which cover do you prefer? To vote just add a comment.

Background: When I came close to the end of writing my PhD thesis I began to think about the cover design for the book. Realising I needed help I blogged this on 12/4. In addition I mailed a few people. The information appeared (amongst other places) on Boing Boing, Lessig, Foreword, Patrik’s sprawl, Perfekta Tomrummet, Free the Mind and Cyberlaw.

Here are the results

Entry 1

Entry 2

Entry 3

Entry 4

Entry 5

Entry 6

Entry 7

Entry 8

Entry 9

Entry 10

Entry 11

Entry 12

Entry 13

Entry 14

Entry 15

Entry 16

Posted on by mklang

bye bye blogburst

This news (below) gives me the push I needed to quit blogburst. The idea of syndication in this way interested me in that it might increase my readership but it annoyed me as it made me think about my readers. In other words the question of what my readers would think occurred to me. I did not change the content of my work in any way. But the appearance of the question in my mind was enough to annoy me.

A writer wants to be read. This is the reason I signed up to the blogburst service. This may have been a bad idea. Posts from Living the Scientific Life and Bitch Ph.D. present some valid arguments for not joining such syndication services.

The blogburst license states that bloggers who sign up agree to:

… a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual license to reproduce, distribute, make derivative works of, perform, display, disclose, and otherwise dispose of the Work (and derivative works thereof) for the purposes ofâ?¦

When I read this I first thought that this could not be wrong. My thinking was that increasing the reach of my writing would be a good thing. But as Bitch Ph.D. explains this is flawed thinking in a couple of ways.

First: If material is published somewhere through blogburst it is very unlikely that the eventual reader will click through to my blog. Therefore I add to the value of someone elseâ??s work without increasing the popularity of my own.

Second: Since the pictures remain on my local server the popularity of my work somewhere else means that my bandwidth is supporting this popularity. Economically this does not effect me too much as blog on the university resources but the principle is that I pay in work and technology and do not get much (or anything in return).

Posted on by mklang

Extreme Blogging

Chrisrine Hurt & Tung Yin have written a paper intriguingly entitled â??Blogging While Untenured and Other Extreme Sportsâ?? for the Bloggership: How Blogs are Transforming Legal Scholarship Symposium at the Berkman Center. April 28, Agenda here. The papers are available via SSRN.

The extreme sport sort of blogging is something which this site keeps coming back to – last visited here.

Hurt & Yin Write in their conclusion:

â?¦we believe that the benefits of pretenured blogging outweigh the costs in our individual situationsâ?¦ Unfortunately, this analysis must be done with an unflinching look at oneâ??s own ability to self-monitor, self-discipline, and manage oneâ??s own time.

Considering the venue it is unsurprising that the authors come out on the side of the blogs but it is precisely this that concerns me. Are they preaching to the choir? The position of untenured (and to a lesser degree those with tenure) academics can be both enhanced and threatened by the blog so a degree of self-criticism and caution may be a good thing.

Posted on by mklang