Mistaken Goal: Where Student Affairs & Technology Meet

NASPA and ASJA (the Association for Student Judicial Affairs) are presenting a webinar in October entitled “The First Amendment and Online Issues in Higher Education.”  The abstract:

College and university student use of online technologies and forums can present challenges for student affairs administrators at every level.  The expanding terrain of cyberspace brings forth questions about student conduct, attitudes and freedoms in online forums such as social networks.  Participants of this Webinar will explore how the law applies to administrators monitoring and responding to online student misconduct.

The event is scheduled for October 10 from 1:30 to 3:00 Eastern.  More info, including pricing, can be found on NASPA’s website.

I’m disappointed that the webinar costs as much as it does (early registration would cost me $75 as a student member of NASPA; that’s $75 for an hour-and-a-half webinar!) but I might try to fit this into my schedule and budget.  I would be interested not only in what the presenters have to say about the law but also in what they choose to discuss as a measure of what technology and legal issues are important to student affairs and higher education.

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Late last week, President Bush signed into law legislation to renew the Higher Education act.  There were some faint rumors (sorry, don’t remember where I read them) that he was not going to sign but he has, albeit without any comment.

In connection with the provisions in the law that pertain to online copyright infringement, ACE and EDUCAUSE have put together a few resources that should prove useful.  First is a memo released a few days ago detailing what the next steps in the legislative process will be as the details in these new provisions are fleshed out.  Second is a free webcast scheduled for Thursday August 21, 2008, at 1:00 PM EDT.  No registration is required; more details can be found here under the “HEA Webcast” tab.

Last week, the Chronicle of Higher Ed reported that we are becoming “exasperated” with the RIAA and their actions and tactics.  Shockingly, the article reports that the RIAA is trying a legal tactic that attempts to use an institution’s previous actions against it.  Specifically, an institution that complained in court that it was burdensome to continue to investigate the RIAA’s complaints was told by the RIAA that “everyone else does it” and the institution’s previous compliance was presented as proof that the investigations were not burdensome.  This seems to put colleges and universities in a really bad position because it appears to force them to decide, up front, if they want to comply with every subsequent RIAA notice and demand.  This doesn’t seem right as the RIAA’s argument seems to ignore the issues of scale and changing situations.  It may not have been burdensome to reply to the first few notices; replying to the 100th or 1000th such notice can easily be burdensome.

Like William Patry, I find this all very depressing.

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Rock on, Central Michigan University!

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Rumor around the water cooler is that we may see a vote for the Higher Education Reauthorization Act today. The House of Representatives has passed the Higher Education Reauthorization Act with similar action expected of the Senate very soon. We’ve been following this for quite a while with interest focused primarily on the portion of the act that focuses on peer-to-peer file sharing and online copyright infringement. For those who have not been following this bill or this portion of the bill, the version of the bill that has been negotiated between the House and the Senate requires colleges and universities:

• Educate students
  • Inform them that unlawful online copyright infringement is unlawful
  • Summarize the penalties for violating Federal copyright laws
  • Inform them about the institution’s online copyright infringement policies and disciplinary actions
• Develop plans to “effectively combat the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material, including through the use of a variety of technology-based deterrents”
• “Offer alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property”

(The precise language can be found in the bill on pages 221-222 and page 237; be warned that this is a long and somewhat large pdf file.)

The Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed are both covering this story although their coverage is much broader than focusing on this one issue. William Patry, Google’s Senior Copyright Counsel, has blasted the online copyright infringement portions of this bill and I’m sure that there are others who are doing the same if you poke around; Steve Worona has done so from a particularly privileged viewpoint as EDUCAUSE’s Director of Policy & Networking Programs. EDUCAUSE has signed an ACE letter that fulfills Doug Lederman’s prediction from a few days ago that “groups will spend much of the next day or two carefully wording letters that neither badmouth the legislation (and by extension those members of Congress who crafted it) nor endorse it.”

As noted by Patry, the discussion from the participants in the conference meeting that resolved the differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill is very interesting and informative. If you really want to dig into this, the relevant material can be found on page 558 of the relevant report (same document as above, same warning: long and large pdf file). Patry has copied and pasted, with comments and discussion, the relevant material on his blog if you want to avoid digging through the pdf.

It looks like the bill will pass both houses and be made into law so it seems to be time to accept the inevitable and being planning on how work with or around these new laws. It may be worth taking several steps back to view the bill in its entirety as it does appear to do many good things but it’s incredibly disappointing to see once again how money influences and corrupts our legislative processes and participants.

(Updated July 31 at 2151 EST to reflect passage in the House)

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I know that I’ve been neglecting this blog for quite some time.  I’ve spent my time blogging over at the NASPA Tech Tools program.  That program is now formally completed so my time and attention will now swing back over to this blog.

More importantly, we’ve opened up all of the material in that program (an 8-week series of blog posts introducing different technologies to student affairs professionals) to everyone; it was previously limited to NASPA members.  All of the original content is licensed under a Creative Commons license so we hope that others will be able to save time and energy by reusing some of the content we developed.

Overall, I am very pleased with how the program turned out.  I am most pleased with the support we received from NASPA throughout the entire program.  The format is a new approach for NASPA and I don’t know if it will be tried for other content but it seemed to make the most sense for this content, particularly as using a blog to present the material was a visible and ongoing demonstration of one of the technologies introduced.  It also fed right into other technologies we discussed such as RSS, tagging and folksonomies, and videos (God bless Lee LeFever and his “… in Plain English” videos!).  NASPA was also completely open when we told them that we wanted to register a new domain name and hosted service.  I was a bit apprehensive to ask to do that but the technical requirements dictated that approach.  It was the right move as it not only allowed us to easily conduct this program (mad props to Christina Dulude who wrote the custom WordPress plugin that made the blog accessible only to logged-in NASPA members!) but it also gives the Technology Knowledge Community a platform for continued experimentation.

I am also very pleased with the content and how it all turned out.  I am particularly fond of how we covered blogs and RSS and I hope participants got a lot out of those two topics as they seem to be the ones that can most immediately make their jobs and lives easier and more interesting.  There were some topics that were more difficult than others to cover because they’re a bit hard to cover in just one or two blog posts.  And, of course, there are topics that we couldn’t cover during the program.  I dearly wish we could have found some way to look at mobile technologies.  I also wish we could have spent more time exploring the cultural changes intertwined with many of these technologies.

In terms of how popular the program was, Awstats and Google Analytics both tell me that there were only a few hundred unique visitors.  I’m curious to see how and if that will change now that non-NASPA members can access the content.  And even “just a few hundred” participants is still a good turnout for such a unique kind of program and larger than many other programs!

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I’m doing at least three things with this blog post:

1. Participating in the NASPA Tech Tools program that asks participants to try out Flickr by creating an account and uploading a photo.
2. Discussing my current research.
3. Providing some hard-to-find information about the use of a digital camera and a copy stand to copy historical documents.

This is a photo of my new portable copy stand. The photo was uploaded to Flickr and it tagged with NASPATechTools; I hope others participating in the Tech Tools program will follow suit and upload some interesting photos.

This device is a copy stand. I would have liked to take the photo with the camera attached to the stand but I had to use the camera to take the photo. The stand that allows me to attach my new camera so the lens faces downwards. Why would I want to do that? The answer lies in the name of the stand - copy stand. I place documents on the table below the camera and take high quality photos of them. More on the specifics in a bit.

But let’s ask “why would I want to do that?” again: Why would I want a portable copy stand?  It’s so I can more easily and quickly conduct some of my current research. I have two strands of research that both focus on locating and analyzing the contents of historical documents. First, I am aiming to discover how American student affairs professionals have used and related to various technologies throughout the history of the profession. One way I’m doing that is by looking through documents in the National Student Affairs Archive at Bowling Green State University. Those documents include program guides from ACPA and NASPA conferences going back to the 1930s and other documents from those organizations related to technology. Second, I am continuing my research into student-used communications and entertainment technologies in American residence halls. To do that, I’m looking through various documents (building design specifications, housing regulations, meeting minutes, etc.) in Bowling Green’s university archives.

If I didn’t have a camera or if the wonderful people at Bowling Green were not letting me use it then I would be (a) carefully poring over each document to fully ingest it, (b) taking many, many notes, and (c) asking the archives staff to copy (probably for a fee) many, many documents. By using my camera to copy documents, I can work much more quickly and, in the long run, cheaply (since I don’t have to pay for copies). I still have to read everything but I am very liberal with what I copy since it’s quick and cheap. Of course, when I say “copy” here I mean “copy for personal research use.” These documents and photos are still copyrighted so I still need to seek permission before I can use these documents for some purposes.

The specific camera I am using is a Canon Powershot S5 IS. I could probably use a cheaper camera but I am very ignorant of photography. One reason I like this camera is that flash must be physically flipped up before it will work. That means that I can’t accidentally forget to turn the flash off before using it to take photos of old documents. Just as important, like many Canon cameras this one came with a USB cable and software that allows me to control the camera using my laptop. Among other things, that eliminates any possibility of me jiggling the camera when I press the button to take photos. The software also automatically sends the photos to my laptop so I can take as many as my hard drive will hold.

It’s not a perfect system. First, being unable to use a flash or external lights means that I am forced to rely on the light in the room. Second, I haven’t begun to figure out all of the settings and options and I know there is some automatic setting that is fouling up the color of the document photos. That’s okay because (a) I can correct that afterwards and (b) it’s not important to get the color correct when I just want to copy a text document.

The image to the right is a sample image. It’s a page from the Report of the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the American College Personnel Association; the meeting was held in Atlantic City on February 20-24, 1935. You can click on the image to view it full size. The only edit I made to this image was to rotate it 180 degrees and crop it. You can’t see the discoloration that I think is being introduced by some automatic setting in the software in this particular image as the pages in this book are already very yellowed with age.  But you can see the quality of the image and how it compares to a photocopy or scan.

With respect to content, this document is of interest to me because of the presentation of original research by AT&T. There are several examples in the early ACPA conferences where representatives from giant corporations - AT&T, General Electric, Westinghouse, and American Steel - gave presentations or read papers. I don’t yet know what to make of those presentations and papers. And that is part of the point: Because it was quick, easy, and cheap, I was able to copy this document so I and file it away so I can read it over in more detail later and continue to think about it and process what it might mean. Without my camera, I would have to weigh whether it would be worth the cost and time to either take very detailed notes or request this document be copied.

I’m finding all sorts of cool things in the National Student Affairs Archives: technology-related presentations from the early 1960s, ACPA and NASPA task forces and ad hoc organizations formed to analyze technology and dissolved within the space of a few years, and the sad story of a comprehensive student affairs information database system jointly created and funded (and then killed) by ACPA and NASPA in the early 1980s. I look forward to being able to digest all of this, make sense of it, and share it with everyone.

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Another online summer development opportunity: StudentAffairs.com’s “Face the Facts: Online Communities Are the Way College Students Communicate” begins next week. Registration closes soon so if you’re interested you need to jump on this! I don’t know the instructor (Maureen McGuinness Clouse at the University of North Texas) but the topic sounds very interesting and pertinent. I know that we here at NSSE spend a lot of time talking about and pondering (and occasionally worrying about) how effectively institutions are communicating with students, particularly using multiple media and electronic tools.

Today also marks the launch of NASPA’s Tech Tools. If you’re a NASPA member, please feel free to log in and participate in this 2-month program. If you’re not a NASPA member, we’ll be opening the content up to everyone at the conclusion of the program. It’s all being licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license so you can reuse the content at your own institution or in your own (non-profit) educational programs.

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Things are still busy on the copyright front. Among other interesting developments and relevant news:

• The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that lawmakers have reached a compromise on the online copyright infringement language in the Higher Ed Act. According to a draft being circulated by aides, “the compromise adopts the House’s requirement that colleges develop plans to ‘detect and prevent’ illegal downloading of music and videos on campus, including offering alternatives to illegal downloading. But negotiators provided a possible out for colleges, adding the phrase ‘to the extent practicable’ to the language.” So it appears that our concerns have been largely unheard or ignored and we will be expected to fund unproven programs and tools even as we’re severely criticized and chastened for increasing tuition and fees.
• In the past month, many college and university administrators have reported an increase in the number of copyright complaints sent by the RIAA. There has been traffic on some of the listservs and articles in the usual places. Many, including myself, have wondered aloud if there is a connection between this unexpected surge in notices and the ongoing legislative efforts (at the federal and state level) supported and pushed by the RIAA and others. Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA, denies that there is a connection. Given this group’s history of dishonesty and deception I am extremely skeptical of Sherman’s claims. In addition, EDUCAUSE Vice President Mark Luker expressed EDUCAUSE’s position that “counting DMCA notices is a completely inappropriate measure of success in combating infringement and an equally inappropriate basis for comparing the amount of infringement taking place campus-to-campus or year-to-year.” I don’t recall if EDUCAUSE has previously stated this position but I am happy that we agree on this common-sense issue.
• Spurred by the attention stirred up by the increase in notices, the RIAA explained how they “catch” students by using the same software students use to share music online. Their investigative firm, MediaSentry, has automated much of the process although they do not actually download the songs. In addition, the anonymous (WTF?) person who gave the Chronicle of Higher Education a demonstration of the RIAA’s operation said that “the automated takedown notice program we have right now is solely university-focused. We’re trying to make universities aware that they have an issue with peer-to-peer file sharing on their network, and so we don’t send automated notices to commercial ISP’s, I think because they are generally aware that there’s a problem.” That, of course, clearly says that the RIAA doesn’t think that colleges and universities are “aware” of this issue. Either that statement is untrue and the RIAA knows that we take this issue seriously or the world views of these two groups - those who profit off of others’ creativity and creations and those who create and innovate - are so far apart that they are irreconcilable.
• Finally, to step out of the world of higher education and gain a glimpse of these issues from a different perspective, DailyTech reports that the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2008 (PRO-IP) has passed through the House of Representatives almost unanimously (408-11). This bill would create a new cabinet-level position to coordinate “antipiracy” efforts and strengthen many laws related to copyright and its enforcement. This bill has been called “a bill that may be the most outrageously gluttonous IP bill ever introduced in the U.S.” by William Patry and criticized by even the Justice department.

Update: The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that Congressional aides are hoping to wrap up negotiations tomorrow (Friday), publish the bill on Monday, name the members of the conference committee on Wednesday, and hold a vote before Memorial Day.  Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) is threatening to hold up the bill if “he is not allowed to offer an amendment that would waive some reporting requirements for colleges that agree to other accountability measures.”  Among his many experiences, Alexander was president of the University of Tennessee from 1988 until 1991, so one would imagine that he knows a thing or two about higher education.

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Members of the House and Senate are still wrangling over the two different versions of the bills renewing and “updating” the Higher Education Act they passed this session to bring them into harmony so they can send them to the president to sign into law. Remember that the House version includes language that would institutions to plan to install filtering or other technological measures to prevent online copyright infringement; the Senate lacks this language and only requires that institutions inform students of relevant institutional policies.

Recently, two important groups have taken a public stand on this issue and expressed their feelings to our elected officials:

• About a month ago, the American Council on Education (ACE) sent a pair of letters to the appropriate chairpersons and ranking members (the chairperson is the senior member of the majority party whereas the ranking member if the senior member of the minority party) expressing support for the Senate bill’s language. ACE is the most powerful education lobbying group in the United States and they often act as a coordinating body for other groups; 12 other groups have signed on to these letters, including EDUCAUSE. The letters specifically note that “the House bill would impose new costs and regulatory burdens on both the Department of Education and campuses while doing very little to address the problem” and urge the use of the Senate language of that section of the bill.
• Yesterday, the U.S. Public Policy Committee of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) - the U.S. public policy arm of “the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society” - sent their own letter to the relevant persons in the Senate and House. Their roots as a scholarly organization are clear in their letter as they focus largely on problems with network filtering, writing that “a Federal
  policy that promotes or requires filtering will indirectly add to the costs of education and
  university research, introduce new security and privacy issues, degrade existing rights under
  copyright, and have little or no lasting impact on infringement of copyrighted works.” Unfortunately, they do not make a very concrete recommendation other than to say that “universities are in the best position to determine how to address infringement.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog is doing a pretty good job covering these events as they occur so it might be worth monitoring it for ongoing coverage. Their coverage is not in-depth but it is timely.

I also note that I can not recall any of the student affairs organizations - NASPA, ACPA, etc. - taking a stand on this issue.  It may be legitimately outside of their bailiwick but I’m not entirely convinced of that given the implications for rising costs of education and the close tie this issue has always had with student discipline.  So I’m a bit disappointed to not see any of these groups sign on to ACE’s letters.  If my memory is too short and these groups have taken an active and public stand that I’ve overlooked or forgotten, please let me know!

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