Hmm, I like that idea, but only if it's limited to the big lecture-style courses. Having taught some smaller classes, I'd be sort of annoyed if one of my lectures showed up online, without me having really prepared for it to be polished or well-thought-out enough to be permanently archived for worldwide broadcast. Talking to a group of 20-30 people somewhat informally would be hard to do if I knew that it were being recorded. Students might be more reticent with questions/discussion as well, if they knew that those would also be showing up on the internet.
With, say, conference keynotes it's different because those are consciously supposed to be public performances, and arguably the big Physics 101 lectures in a 300-person auditorium are pretty similar as well, especially if they're by a prof who's given the lecture several times, so has a sort of "standard" rehearsed performance of it.
This is something we've heard a lot of from professors - not sure how it will play out in the long run (we only launched a week ago, although we already have submissions from ~60 schools - more audio than we can process!!)
Perhaps the solution is to cut them off at the pass, as it were. Record your lectures yourself and make them available online, so students won't even be thinking about making bootlegs.
> Record your lectures yourself and make them available online
The point though is then it's not the same teaching--- if I'm recording something For Official Broadcast, it's a different kind of thing than if I'm having an informal seminar with 20 people in a room where we all (at least sort of) know each other. I'll be more formal and less chatty, students will be less free with their discussion too, etc.
I don't think there's anything wrong with a more formal, archival-intended lecture from the podium, like a keynote speech or a big auditorium lecture. But I don't think it should be the only kind of thing to exist, either. I think it should be possible for people to discuss and learn in smaller groups without anyone (teachers or students) worrying that every single thing they say is on-camera, 1984-style. I mean, apart from me; do my students want every single question they ask in class, some smarter-sounding than others, to end up on the internet?
I do support making the materials more widely (and ideally, freely) available--- course notes, slides, papers, tutorials, textbooks, etc. It's just actually recording people against their will in a setting where they should be able to feel free to discuss & ask questions that has the weird 1984-ish vibe.
Concerning the questions students ask. I completely concur that it is an issue.
I have only ever taught lab classes, and even in those groups of 10-14 people, getting people comfortable enough to ask their questions took a skill (I don't know if I ever got the hang of it) and constant attention toward not shutting people down. The times that the class was split into lab-partner teams of 2 people, and I roamed between those teams, the questions were far more free-flowing, and about basic/fundamental concepts. Letting me know I probably wasn't covering those kinds of concepts well enough other times, but I wasn't getting feedback on it because no one had wanted to ask.
In my possibly biased and very limited experience, it was usually students with more "in-your-face gruffness" that would speak-up in larger groups to ask about basic things I wasn't explaining as well as they needed. It made me appreciate that personality type more.
Agreed. I teach lower down in the academic chain. Dyslexic students often ask if they can record (audio) lessons. We teach in small groups and I encourage people to ask questions, and take over the whiteboard &c.
The deal with students recording the session is that the recordings are for personal use only. Noone has broken that understanding as yet so far as I am aware...
Because everyone in a participatory/discussion class would have to agree to have the distribution happen. Plus, you may not want certain discussions to go public, depending on the nature of the subject and the direction some discussions take.
EDIT: s/wild/public/ I was originally looking for 'viral', but I just remember some of my smaller college classes sometimes getting into intimate discussions that wouldn't have happened if there was a chance that the class would have been public.
I am STRONGLY against this kind of service and I hope you will consider removing any recording that was not approved by the lecturer.
Otherwise, I want a recording of everything you have said while working. Actually, I want a recording of everything everybody said while they were working so my BigBrother TM audio processing technology can highlight anything that was out of line, incorrect, inappropriate, whatever.
I hope you understand that most lecturers/profs/researchers/people aren't concerned about their copyrights. They are concerned about their reputation and about what ill intentioned school administrators, students or politicians could do with these recordings. You just need one bad case of misuse of these recordings before some universities or unions sue the hell out of you.
I share your goal: education is good and the more people learn, the better the world will become. But if you start recording everything I say in my lectures, I promise you that they will be way more boring.
But people don't want anonymized recordings, they want to know that they are listening to a recording of a psychology lecture at Harvard, not a generic psychology lecture. If you anonymizing a Harvard lecture, someone else will go "There's no harvard lecture on this site, I'll record my own one and upload it"
Are there any known instances of a lecture recording being used against an instructor unfairly?
I doubt doing things that could be construed as "out of line, incorrect, inappropriate, whatever" really improve your lectures in a significant and sustainable way. In any case, there are better ways to be interesting and entertaining [1].
I think everyone understand that instructors aren't concerned about copyrights. They're concerned about having to improve the quality of their lectures, or have a permanent record of lectures they're not really proud of.
"I think everyone understand that instructors aren't concerned about copyrights."
Well if you click on the "about" link on lectureleaks.com, you'll see that they only talk about copyrights. They do not seem to care about anything else... Incidentally, they have quite a lengthy copyright and license notice themselves... Maybe I should write one for my course.
"Are there any known instances of a lecture recording being used against an instructor unfairly?"
If you asked me whether instructors were sometimes treated unfairly by students, administrators or politicians, I would say yes. Having access to recorded lectures just adds a new angle of attack.
"I doubt doing things that could be construed as "out of line, incorrect, inappropriate, whatever" really improve your lectures in a significant and sustainable way."
I was actually referring to some ill intentioned people who would turn a joke, a simple mistake you made, or a controversial topic you taught against you. For example, teaching evolution is a risky business in some US states.
Woah, what? I understand how people could believe that papers should be public given that many were funded by public research grants, but I've taught a class for two years now and not only am I not funded through a public research grant, I'm not paid. I don't see how you could construe that my lectures are the property of anyone but me and my university (which is private).
The sense of entitlement that people get when tax dollars are even remotely involved is astonishing. While I agree with the idea of open-access journals, I find this vigilantism crude and a bit naive.
If you think about it, the people also pay the salaries of corporate employees. You buy the product, it's your dollar at work. Yet nobody has the same sense of I paid you thus I deserve all your ip and time that they do when tax dollars are at work. I suppose it must have something to do with having a choice to pay: with taxes, you have none.
I can't shake the feeling that all of this has much less to do with people wanting to learn and much more to do with people wanting to take it to the man.
> I can't shake the feeling that all of this has much less to do with people wanting to learn and much more to do with people wanting to take it to the man.
I think it might be people with genuine idealism about the virtues of openness trying to find a way to go in that direction and hoping to yoke the sense of entitlement other people have in order that it will do some rhetorical work for them. If you find the one distasteful, then those seeking to use it as a tool might lose some respect for doing so.
Personally I think the important issue for more openness isn't finding such rhetoric to motivate it. It is finding and promoting solutions to the review process and filtering/ranking-by-quality of papers in more fields. If the best minds in a field don't have any other incentive toward contributing to that process than the journal system, then I still need to go through the maw of the journals (or tell the library I use to do so) when I need to learn about the field using the benefit of the understanding in those minds.
Really? Perhaps the British Library, yes, but not my local. Not even my university has access to most journals. Thankfully I have two separate accounts at different universities so I can usually find what I'm looking for.
They are generally not open to the public, and when they are you are rarely allowed to access electronic journals because of the licence agreement which the university has signed with the publisher.
At my local library (largest in my state) you have to be on one of the library computers to access any pay journals. Which is annoying, especially since I would have to wait for a spot.
Do most local libraries in the US really have unrestricted JSTOR access? Here only the University libraries have JSTOR and they only make it available to students and faculty.
This is actually the thing I miss the most from my graduate days.
JSTOR is a gold mine of wonderful knowledge: you can search for any word you like and instantly be connected with hundreds of years of very intelligent scholarship. You acquire a feeling of immense humility at the breadth of things known to humanity but not to yourself. Surely this is something sorely missing from contemporary civic society, and especially the freely-available discourse on the web.
Someone will make a lot of money if they can find a way to charge a reasonable monthly fee for temporary access to this knowledge without killing the golden calf of institutional subscriptions. It should be no different than the Encyclopedia, which was enormously valuable but didn't dry up demand for academic publishing.
It is my goal to have personal access to JSTOR by the time my kids can surf the web.
It annoys me that there's essentially a big cartel of the publishers and the universities and university students so that they can access it for free. And that's why it's been slow to change, the people who most want access already have it for free. It's the general public who are cut out. If graduate students had to pay the same fee as the general public, things would have changed by now.
General public is not anywhere nearly as interested as academia people. The ones who are in the greatest need of access to science journals are researchers, and since most of them work for public research institutions, they already have it. Undergraduate students don't really care about papers, because they're too advanced for most of them to grasp. That's why they use textbooks. People who are not connected with academia, but still want to have an access to academic papers, are a really, really small group, so it's no strange that nobody cares about them.
Would JSTOR have released these had the Schwartz action not occured? I suggest not. Does this then justify his actions? I don't know, but his actions have certainly proven advantageous to scientific study and breaking of the anti-science monopoly.
> Why not make any and all public domain content freely available? We do not believe that just because something is in the public domain, it can always be provided for free. There are costs associated with selection, digitization, access provision, preservation, and a wide variety of services that are necessary for content to reach those who need it. We have determined that we can sustain free access and meet our preservation obligations for this particular set of content for individuals as part of our overall activities undertaken in pursuit of our mission.
Sigh. I really wish the media would start covering things like this. Imagine the nation panicking over caged science - no publisher would be able to withstand the onslaught. Instead, we're stuck with reality show politics.
I don't know about that. Thinking about the four universities I've got experience with, the only one that didn't have someone checking IDs at the door of the library was the small one that probably couldn't afford it.
In my experience, in Boston, nobody will bat an eye if you go into most libraries at MIT (so long as you don't go breaking into wiring closets) or BU. Harvard is very restrictive because it'd probably be overrun with tourists otherwise. I think libraries in big cities (NYC) tend to be more exclusive, to keep out the riff-raff and homeless people, but such cities usually have good public research libraries.
In Toronto, the the UofT libraries are accessible to anybody. However, I did once get kicked out of the Law Society of Upper Canada library when I mixed up Osgoode Hall with the Osgoode Hall law school when I was doing research for a high school class, and I'm still bitter about that.
So maybe the overall answer is that whether a school has people checking IDs depends less on rational decisions and more on their history—have they had trouble, have they had paranoid management, that sort of thing.
From my experience (in Poland), university libraries are open for whoever wants to use them. My department does not even care whether people who attend classes are actually students of my department -- as long as there are free chairs and desks, you're welcome to attend almost any course. If you talk about it with dean and professor responsible for the course, you can even pass it this way, so that if you actually enroll in some degree program in future, you don't need to do it again. I actually have friends who passed courses on my university when they were in high school.
The problem of publicly-funded-but-privately-owned scientific research is a pet peeve of mine, but this guerilla action is not the answer. Scientific research is a slow process of careful accumulation, sifting, and construction of links. What we need to build are permanent, publicly accessible webs built of reliable links, webs that are built up over years -- probably over the course of entire careers, and one's successors's careers. Not a pile of PDF files smuggled out of the academy and distributed via thumb drive and anonymous Bittorrent.
If I cannot simultaneously post my name, a pertinent comment, and a bunch of reliable direct links to the scientific literature on a public blog without risking legal repercussions, the discourse is still screwed. We're still trapped in the last century, when I could write a letter to my colleagues commenting on recent publications but nobody could properly understand and critique the letter without independently looking up those publications.
Not really. This is about being able to access the specific papers written; it is not about being able to read an aggregate of the research without necessarily being able to look at the original source (which is what Wikipedia is).
Indeed, Wikipedia's particular style won't work for science.
The shame of modern science is that what might work is so simple to build, because it is already built. Research papers already form a web: They all have references to prior research papers, which in turn have references of their own. Moreover, the community of researchers and their students would quickly and happily turn all those links into clickable ones -- if only paywalls didn't prevent them. [1]
It's no coincidence that even the simplest of web pages is already perfectly suited for scientific research: Tim Berners-Lee built HTML and HTTP for that purpose. But now science lags behind, say, LOLcats or the Twilight books when it comes to online discussion, and I assert that it's not merely because science is esoteric [2]: It's because scientific publishing is suffocated by rent-seekers.
---
[1] Actually, my understanding is that cross-journal hyperlinks are slowly evolving within academia: Once you're inside the university library's firewall you can make actual working hyperlinks that are only, say, 65% less efficient than the average Wikipedia link. This is great for those who are currently inside the ivory tower. Not so great for me and the other 99.9% of humanity.
[2] What I wonder is the extent to which science remains esoteric because it has always required so much training and money to read the literature that the literature has never needed to evolve actual readability. Why bother learning to explain your work to a popular audience when your writing will only ever appear in journals that are only visible to your colleagues?
Historically, we've relied on great science journalism to make up the difference. (Gods bless you, Isaac Asimov.) But great science journalism, like all journalism, is rare and getting rarer.
Atleast they should reduce the time after which a journal/research paper becomes out-of-copyright. As is with the patents. And then they can searched freely.
90% of the 8 billion dollar world-wide market for academic research is paid for by library subscriptions. There is a serious problem here, indeed. Some excellent facts and recommendations were posted in this report. It was written by the Association of American Universities (61 leading research universities) in January, 2010 and it was initiated by the U.S. House’s Science and Technology Committee in conjunction with the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP):
http://www.aau.edu/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=10044
53 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 91.7 ms ] threadWith, say, conference keynotes it's different because those are consciously supposed to be public performances, and arguably the big Physics 101 lectures in a 300-person auditorium are pretty similar as well, especially if they're by a prof who's given the lecture several times, so has a sort of "standard" rehearsed performance of it.
Perhaps the solution is to cut them off at the pass, as it were. Record your lectures yourself and make them available online, so students won't even be thinking about making bootlegs.
The point though is then it's not the same teaching--- if I'm recording something For Official Broadcast, it's a different kind of thing than if I'm having an informal seminar with 20 people in a room where we all (at least sort of) know each other. I'll be more formal and less chatty, students will be less free with their discussion too, etc.
I don't think there's anything wrong with a more formal, archival-intended lecture from the podium, like a keynote speech or a big auditorium lecture. But I don't think it should be the only kind of thing to exist, either. I think it should be possible for people to discuss and learn in smaller groups without anyone (teachers or students) worrying that every single thing they say is on-camera, 1984-style. I mean, apart from me; do my students want every single question they ask in class, some smarter-sounding than others, to end up on the internet?
I do support making the materials more widely (and ideally, freely) available--- course notes, slides, papers, tutorials, textbooks, etc. It's just actually recording people against their will in a setting where they should be able to feel free to discuss & ask questions that has the weird 1984-ish vibe.
I have only ever taught lab classes, and even in those groups of 10-14 people, getting people comfortable enough to ask their questions took a skill (I don't know if I ever got the hang of it) and constant attention toward not shutting people down. The times that the class was split into lab-partner teams of 2 people, and I roamed between those teams, the questions were far more free-flowing, and about basic/fundamental concepts. Letting me know I probably wasn't covering those kinds of concepts well enough other times, but I wasn't getting feedback on it because no one had wanted to ask.
In my possibly biased and very limited experience, it was usually students with more "in-your-face gruffness" that would speak-up in larger groups to ask about basic things I wasn't explaining as well as they needed. It made me appreciate that personality type more.
The deal with students recording the session is that the recordings are for personal use only. Noone has broken that understanding as yet so far as I am aware...
EDIT: s/wild/public/ I was originally looking for 'viral', but I just remember some of my smaller college classes sometimes getting into intimate discussions that wouldn't have happened if there was a chance that the class would have been public.
Otherwise, I want a recording of everything you have said while working. Actually, I want a recording of everything everybody said while they were working so my BigBrother TM audio processing technology can highlight anything that was out of line, incorrect, inappropriate, whatever.
I hope you understand that most lecturers/profs/researchers/people aren't concerned about their copyrights. They are concerned about their reputation and about what ill intentioned school administrators, students or politicians could do with these recordings. You just need one bad case of misuse of these recordings before some universities or unions sue the hell out of you.
I share your goal: education is good and the more people learn, the better the world will become. But if you start recording everything I say in my lectures, I promise you that they will be way more boring.
I doubt doing things that could be construed as "out of line, incorrect, inappropriate, whatever" really improve your lectures in a significant and sustainable way. In any case, there are better ways to be interesting and entertaining [1].
I think everyone understand that instructors aren't concerned about copyrights. They're concerned about having to improve the quality of their lectures, or have a permanent record of lectures they're not really proud of.
[1] Richard Buckland, UNSW: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bLCjMA0YlE
Well if you click on the "about" link on lectureleaks.com, you'll see that they only talk about copyrights. They do not seem to care about anything else... Incidentally, they have quite a lengthy copyright and license notice themselves... Maybe I should write one for my course.
"Are there any known instances of a lecture recording being used against an instructor unfairly?"
If you asked me whether instructors were sometimes treated unfairly by students, administrators or politicians, I would say yes. Having access to recorded lectures just adds a new angle of attack.
"I doubt doing things that could be construed as "out of line, incorrect, inappropriate, whatever" really improve your lectures in a significant and sustainable way."
I was actually referring to some ill intentioned people who would turn a joke, a simple mistake you made, or a controversial topic you taught against you. For example, teaching evolution is a risky business in some US states.
If you think about it, the people also pay the salaries of corporate employees. You buy the product, it's your dollar at work. Yet nobody has the same sense of I paid you thus I deserve all your ip and time that they do when tax dollars are at work. I suppose it must have something to do with having a choice to pay: with taxes, you have none.
I can't shake the feeling that all of this has much less to do with people wanting to learn and much more to do with people wanting to take it to the man.
I think it might be people with genuine idealism about the virtues of openness trying to find a way to go in that direction and hoping to yoke the sense of entitlement other people have in order that it will do some rhetorical work for them. If you find the one distasteful, then those seeking to use it as a tool might lose some respect for doing so.
Personally I think the important issue for more openness isn't finding such rhetoric to motivate it. It is finding and promoting solutions to the review process and filtering/ranking-by-quality of papers in more fields. If the best minds in a field don't have any other incentive toward contributing to that process than the journal system, then I still need to go through the maw of the journals (or tell the library I use to do so) when I need to learn about the field using the benefit of the understanding in those minds.
Before I would email the professor and request a copy, usually they would oblige.
JSTOR is a gold mine of wonderful knowledge: you can search for any word you like and instantly be connected with hundreds of years of very intelligent scholarship. You acquire a feeling of immense humility at the breadth of things known to humanity but not to yourself. Surely this is something sorely missing from contemporary civic society, and especially the freely-available discourse on the web.
Someone will make a lot of money if they can find a way to charge a reasonable monthly fee for temporary access to this knowledge without killing the golden calf of institutional subscriptions. It should be no different than the Encyclopedia, which was enormously valuable but didn't dry up demand for academic publishing.
It is my goal to have personal access to JSTOR by the time my kids can surf the web.
> Why not make any and all public domain content freely available? We do not believe that just because something is in the public domain, it can always be provided for free. There are costs associated with selection, digitization, access provision, preservation, and a wide variety of services that are necessary for content to reach those who need it. We have determined that we can sustain free access and meet our preservation obligations for this particular set of content for individuals as part of our overall activities undertaken in pursuit of our mission.
In Toronto, the the UofT libraries are accessible to anybody. However, I did once get kicked out of the Law Society of Upper Canada library when I mixed up Osgoode Hall with the Osgoode Hall law school when I was doing research for a high school class, and I'm still bitter about that.
If I cannot simultaneously post my name, a pertinent comment, and a bunch of reliable direct links to the scientific literature on a public blog without risking legal repercussions, the discourse is still screwed. We're still trapped in the last century, when I could write a letter to my colleagues commenting on recent publications but nobody could properly understand and critique the letter without independently looking up those publications.
(EDIT: grammar)
The shame of modern science is that what might work is so simple to build, because it is already built. Research papers already form a web: They all have references to prior research papers, which in turn have references of their own. Moreover, the community of researchers and their students would quickly and happily turn all those links into clickable ones -- if only paywalls didn't prevent them. [1]
It's no coincidence that even the simplest of web pages is already perfectly suited for scientific research: Tim Berners-Lee built HTML and HTTP for that purpose. But now science lags behind, say, LOLcats or the Twilight books when it comes to online discussion, and I assert that it's not merely because science is esoteric [2]: It's because scientific publishing is suffocated by rent-seekers.
---
[1] Actually, my understanding is that cross-journal hyperlinks are slowly evolving within academia: Once you're inside the university library's firewall you can make actual working hyperlinks that are only, say, 65% less efficient than the average Wikipedia link. This is great for those who are currently inside the ivory tower. Not so great for me and the other 99.9% of humanity.
[2] What I wonder is the extent to which science remains esoteric because it has always required so much training and money to read the literature that the literature has never needed to evolve actual readability. Why bother learning to explain your work to a popular audience when your writing will only ever appear in journals that are only visible to your colleagues?
Historically, we've relied on great science journalism to make up the difference. (Gods bless you, Isaac Asimov.) But great science journalism, like all journalism, is rare and getting rarer.