[Working notes, with cloned or borrowed materials that still need to be organized]
Legal issues
[Cut/paste from http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:8TPFbR31J7oJ:mbyron.philosophy.kent.edu/pubs/tiki.pdf+using+wiki+for+collaborative+assignment&hl=en&start=5] ???
Privacy protection: A distinct issue concerns FERPA, the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act. This federal legislation protects the privacy student education records, including work products and grades, and it presents a potential obstacle to any kind of written collaborative work in class. The issue is that under FERPA student work should not be distributed or exposed to anyone other than the instructor without the student's explicit consent. This would leave participation in collaborative work up to the individual student, and instructors could hardly assign it under those conditions. Consequently, in order to use Tiki, I must require students in my classes to waive applicable rights under FERPA. I do this by including a disclaimer in the syllabus, which explains the situation and states that by remaining in the class, students agree to waive their privacy rights with respect to collaborative work for the course. The waiver is explicit and limited, and it does not extend, for example, to the students' grades for the course or any other evaluation by me. I have discussed this issue and vetted my specific disclaimer with our school's director of network security, and this seems to be the best solution, given existing legislation.
"For more information about FERPA, please visit http://www.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/index.html. Here is the specific notice I have employed on my syllabi: FERPA Statement
This course may require contribution to the discussion forum, wiki, and other collaborative projects. Collaborative projects by their very nature expose student work products to other students and possibly members of the public, although graded work and student grades will never be disclosed. Nonetheless, the nature of collaborative work makes it impossible to protect all of students' privacy rights under applicable provisions of FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act). Students remaining in the class thus agree to waive their FERPA rights for any collaborative work for this course."
The Intellectual Property Impossibility
|
Brian Lamb Another policy issue that threatens to complicate the widespread adoption of wikis in higher education is the specification of intellectual property (IP) rights by contributors to a wiki page. IP issues can be dauntingly complex under any circumstance, but when contributors may be anonymous, or where the origins of texts are uncertain, copyright questions are significantly complicated. The open-editing function of wikis implies that a work may perpetually be in process, inviting participation from anyone. But what if the author of a page does not accept the implications? Three common IP schemes presently in use by wiki communities—when they bother to define a policy at all—are CommunityCopyright, PublicDomain, and CopyLeft.27 A CommunityCopyright policy allows individuals to assert rights over their work while allowing their contributions to be modified within the wiki. (Of course, the copyright owner can subsequently reverse those modifications.) A PublicDomain policy dictates that any contributor to the wiki space surrenders all copyright. A modification of this approach is PrimarilyPublicDomain, which assumes a PublicDomain policy unless an individual specifies otherwise. CopyLeft allows anyone to use the content of the wiki for any purpose and to make derivative works, under the condition that all copies and derivative works are released under the same license as the original. The contributor maintains copyright. Any one of these policies is reasonably straightforward. But things can get nasty in wiki communities in which different users hold divergent visions of what constitutes an appropriate policy. The result is an application of what the CommunityWiki describes as the SecondCopyrightImpossibilityTheorem: “Every copyright policy will be incompatible with at least one other copyright policy in at least one direction. This will occur even where all parties concerned desire the copyright policies to be compatible.”28 There are no easy answers to the theorem—it is impossible, after all—though ill-feeling may be lessened by specifying one policy or another, preferably after consulting the user community. Hopefully those who cannot accept the conditions will find some other place to post content. IP issues - "Three common IP schemes presently in use by wiki communities when they bother to define a policy at all are CommunityCopyright, PublicDomain, and CopyLeft.27 A CommunityCopyright policy allows individuals to assert rights over their work while allowing their contributions to be modified within the wiki. (Of course, the copyright owner can subsequently reverse those modifications.) A PublicDomain policy dictates that any contributor to the wiki space surrenders all copyright. A modification of this approach is PrimarilyPublicDomain, which assumes a PublicDomain policy unless an individual specifies otherwise. CopyLeft allows anyone to use the content of the wiki for any purpose and to make derivative works, under the condition that all copies and derivative works are released under the same license as the original. The contributor maintains copyright." |
Recommendations
- Teachers will be required to develop an awareness of legal and ethics issues which will be new requirements for teachers.
- While projects like the MIT Open courseware one provide access to materials, it doesn’t address the role the community will play in the evolution of academic resources or questions of intellectual property. These issues will need to be included in the agenda of discussion on collaborative learning, as appropriate licenses create the possibility that users can contribute to a collaborative effort while having their contribution somehow recognized.
- It is not that elements of a legal framework do not exit. GNU Public Licenses (legal contracts) can be used to preserve the rights of those who create the software while still permitting public access to the source code. The Creative Common quite recent initiative proposes similar licences for written and multimedia material open to edition.
|
|
|
|
|
|
