The Leisurely Historian… Comics, Cartoons, Computers, and Cultural History…

COPYRAGE

My Digital Storytelling class is covering copyright this week, and while my classmates have definitely offered some articulate and cogent points on the topic in their blog posts, I'm deeply discouraged by the apparent emotional effect of reading a couple hours of information on copyright. The prevalent emotions that people describe after this week's reading are fear, discouragement, and sadness.

I'd like to offer an alternative: Rage. Anger and indignation. I know, we're supposed to be educators, academics. Dispassionate. Objective. We're supposed to keep our heads low, to save our politics and our opinions for obscure monographs that nobody reads. Educators may be "liberal" or "progressive," but certainly not radical. We're the theory folks-- leave the praxis to someone else.

I think it's time we all channel our inner Howard Beale and say:

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth; educators are having to make due with even less, and at the same time we're told that digital instruction is the future. We're expected to be high-tech and given little institutional support and no legal guidance.

We know this is an untenable situation. And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we have had another 20,000 copyright suits and 30,000 more on the way-- as if that's the way it's supposed to be!

We all know things are bad -- worse than bad -- they're crazy.

It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my Youtube mashups and let me use a copyrighted picture in my PowerPoints now and again, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone."

Well, I'm not going to leave you alone.

I want you to get mad!

I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write to your Congressman, because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and No Child Left Behind and the state budget cuts and the infringements on our right to Fair Use.

All I know is that first, you've got to get mad.

You've gotta say, "I'm a human being, goddammit! My life has value! I have a right to free expression!"

So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell,

"I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!!"

Teaching, researching, and scholarship are all spelled out in our copyright law as protected activities that entitle one to protection under fair use. We shouldn't let ourselves be cowered.

And while that passage was written before there was a need to take into account issues like digital pedagogy, I'd argue that it provides for "multiple copies for classroom use" provides a spirit-of-the-law coverage. And don't even get me started on Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, and its implications for the current state of copyright.

But the fact is, copyright law in America is broken, it grows more and more restrictive, and monied corporate copyright holders have the means to bury individuals, even when those individuals work within the letter of the law with regard to copyright.

And in reaction to this, as we saw in Bound by Law?, documentarians-- even those who operate in accordance with fair use laws-- are forced to take an array of CYA measures, including paying for clearances that shouldn't be necessary, editing out key scenes that they can't afford to clear, and paying exorbitantly for Errors and Omissions Insurance.

So where does that leave us as academics, educators, and students? If we need to be developing these digital skills, to be come digital storytellers ourselves... and if the internet allows us to engage students in a truly multimedia way that is deeply compelling-- it's no wonder that we look at the hoops that filmmakers jump through with fear. 'Cause teachers have even fewer financial and other resources than even low-budget filmmakers. But we can't let that push us away from the inevitable direction of education, and we can't just keep everything we do behind the walled garden of BlackBoard. At least I couldn't. Not in good conscience.

Instead, we have to take the opposite approach. We have to assert, and assert loudly, that just because we use digital technology doesn't change the fact that we are academics, teachers, and students. This may mean coming into conflict, at times, with administrators and University Copyright Offices. It may mean getting a few takedown notices and cease and desist letters... That just means you're doing something right, if it lands in the hands of higher-ups and people outside the school.

Thinking about it, I realized that the provisions protected by fair use and free speech-- teaching, research, scholarship, criticism, and parody-- that represents something like 99% of everything I do, when it comes to re-purposing other people's copyrighted material. That could change some day, and I am fine with that, but until it does, I'm just going to go ahead under the assumption that if I'm doing it, then it's fair use. I refuse to distract myself from the more important issues of scholarship, social and political commentary, communication with students, etc. by the thought of the possibility of copyright lawyers swooping in like Dementors and hitting me with a lawsuit.

So I leave you with a little image I created. Yeah, it's got a couple copyrighted figures in it, from some big companies: McDonalds, Disney, Warner Brothers, and Windows. But I just don't care. It's satire. And the purpose of this blog is academic. That's protected. And plus-- I'm doing it, it must be fair use.

Digital Storytelling Progress Report…

So. I had an idea that I liked, a project that I thought was good.

But as it came along, I saw it didn't fit the timeline for the course well enough. And that community I wanted to explore? It never materialized-- at least, not for me. I have received only THREE user-submitted testimonials... And that's after making it into a contest and offering to give away two books.

So then I changed my topic. Last week I brought in the storyboard of my new idea: "Why online lectures suck. And what we can do about it." Conferencing, the instructor didn't really like how I was framing it. And as I thought about it and looked into it more, I came to agree with her.

Now I'm working-- once again-- on getting a script worked out that actually works, dealing with topic number two.

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At this point, I'm kind of reconsidering my feelings on digital storytelling as a pedagogical tool. I feel like my original project idea was feasible, could have created a good video, and could have been completed on time. But it didn't work with the way that the class-- that classes in general-- are set up. I think the problem is the fact that different projects require different creative processes.

If you're doing something that's interview-heavy, you're going to take a lot more time gathering sources and editing, but there won't be as much time needed for other processes. Storyboards and scripts may come later if at all, once the sources let you know what they're going to say. If you're going for a Junior-League Ken Burns kind of thing, scripting and storyboarding are far more important. Your research will be mostly finding pictures to pan over. Filming won't be as time-consuming.

And those are just two broad examples. Everyone works on every project differently. You have to work with the project, you've gotta go with the grain, and let the logical demands of the project inform your timeline.

Grading and classroom supervision aren't like that, however. They have to be rationalized. People need deadlines, and the deadlines need to be the same for everyone. Introducing something like DST to students requires that you keep on them with a timeline, etc. That you supervise and micromanage and, at least to a certain extent, that you standardize. You have to schedule assignments and deadlines as if everyone's process is the same, when in fact, different projects have different timelines because they demand differing amounts of attention to different aspects of the process.

I think that DST could be an incredibly useful tool for students in, for example, a Montessori classroom, where individualized attention and learners setting their own pace is the norm. But that's not a luxury that many of us will have. Most of us will have to be in classrooms where things are, as a matter of course, basically standardized. Classroom size, teaching loads, etc. mean that this is basically outside of our control. And in that sort of setting, I'm starting to question the utility of trying to teach DST techniques, etc.

This is not a rejection of the concept as a whole, of course. I do think that it's important that scholars and teachers use techniques like this. We need to see beyond the chalkboard, the powerpoint slideshow, the monograph. And this *is* a good way to approach certain topics, and can lead to different sorts of learning outcomes for those who take the time to do it.

I'm just wondering-- is it really compatible with most people's classroom reality?