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Comment Wikipedia as Extra Credit (Score 1) 138

I frequently use Wikipedia article-writing as an extra credit option in college film and TV courses.

It works well, because students can fill in details on sometimes obscure, but still notable, topics -- e.g., plot summaries of films. Plus, since they're reading original sources for my courses, they can also cite those sources, as Wikipedia policy demands. They submit the URLs of the articles they've modified/created to me and I always check them for accuracy and proper wiki-style.

In addition to increasing Wikipedia's breadth/depth on film/TV topics, it encourages students to get involved in the Wikipedia-editing process.

Comment A Shame That UCLA Won't Contest This (Score 1) 134

I find it a shame that UCLA won't contest this attack on fair use, because the fair-use defense desperately needs some clarification in the context of copyrighted video being used in an educational context.

For cinema professors, it's essential that they be able to provide their primary texts (i.e., films) to students. Over the past 15-20 years, it's become clear that it is fair use for cinema educators to use film stills in PowerPoint slide shows, course Web sites, and textbooks. See, for example, Bordwell and Thompson's Film Art. Initially, however, copyright holders objected to this use of stills, wrongly claimed that it was not fair use, and demanded payment. Despite this resistance, fair-use of stills has become standard practice.

Unfortunately, there is no similar standard for fair use of moving images. And, because UCLA is not using fair use to defend the posting of (copyrighted) video in a password-protected online system open only to students, an important opportunity to set precedent has been lost.

The result will be chilling. If freakin' UCLA cannot defend the fair-use posting of videos, then what chance does the average state university or small private college have?

Comment Not Always a 'Transformative' Experience (Score 1) 276

For over a year now, I've been doing something similar in film-studies classes I teach and I'd say the results have been far less than 'transformative', as TFA reports. In fact, I'd say it's been more failure than success and I discontinued a good part of it this year.
Here's what I did last academic year, in two junior/senior-level seminars:
  1. All students were required to contribute to a wiki I run -- collaboratively producing lecture and discussion notes.
  2. Students were also offered extra credit to edit film articles on Wikipedia.
The results of this wiki experiment were mixed. Less than half of the students did the required assignment -- even though their grades were lowered for lack of participation and constructing lecture/discussion notes would have been a huge advantage to them on the exams.
And, as far as the extra-credit option goes, out of about 40 students, only 3 chose to do it. The ones that did sent me their Wikipedia ID and a link to the articles they edited. By checking the articles' history pages I could easily see how much work they did and how good it was.
I wish I had a better sense of why my wiki experiment failed. Is wiki editing (which works like word processing did in, oh, 1985) too hard and unfamiliar? Are students unwilling to share their lecture/discussion notes with others? Should the assignments have been structured differently? Were these particular students luddites who did not understand the technology of wikis? Did I not give them enough instruction on how wikis work?
I really don't know the answer, but my experience last year was negative enough that this year I eliminated the required wiki work, although I am still offering extra credit for editing Wikipedia articles. We'll see how it goes.

TiVo to Drop Lifetime Service Plan 301

Thomas Hawk writes "TiVo held their most recent analyst conference call today and on the call announced that they will be dropping their lifetime subscription option as well as offering three new monthly no upfront fee TiVo plans combining their box and service for one year, two year and three year commitments. Additionally they announced that their highly anticipated Series 3 HDTV standalone model with CableCARD support will not be available until after "mid year," a new retail partnership with Radio Shack and the fact that the company is in solid discussions with other cable operators for deals similar to their previously announced Comcast initiative."

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