Legal Rights and Liabilities for Bloggers At Northern Voice

Legal Rights and Liabilities for Bloggers
Kevin O’Keefe

• It’s not the damages, it’s the cost of defense — insurance will cover that
• It’s not likely to get sued, and a simple retraction will usually solve the issue
• Posts can be seen worldwide, and can have a wide effect
• Be concerned about liabilities in other countries
• If someone defames a third party in comments on your blog, you (as the blogger) are not liable
• Lawyers get paid to be creative — try to find particular legislation or cases that may support them
• Legislation protects personal info from improper disclosure
• Trade secrets — value is secrecy. No value if disclosed
• Blogging while working — loss of productivity? Or personal and professional growth
• You have freedom of speech, but you don’t have freedom to be employed — employers can fire you at will
• A blog is closer to a Rotary meeting than a web site — help your employer understanding what blogs are
• Newspaper publishes letter in print, they can be responsible. If it was comment online attached to an article, no liability
• Save a draft, and consider an angry price
• Consider insurance
• Consider resources like EFF
• Resources on lexblog.com

Building Rich Communities With Wiki At Northern Voice

Building Rich Communities with Wikis
Stewart Mader Using Wiki in Education

• Ten case studies — what tool are they using, how has it changed their classes
• Publishers weren’t excited about the book existing online as a wiki — but that wouldn’t allow interaction and sharing
• Some chapters are open, and some are closed
• It’s not proprietary, and there’s a loss of control for the publisher
• We need to have a community around it for it to work
• Atlassian Software Systems (software for the project)
• You don’t have to put something down in print to show that you’ve “published”
• Publishing online will become wildly richer with the application of community
• You no longer just see the finished product, but the process that you went through to get there
• Wikipedia — You Either Get It Or You Don’t
• Peer review during writing, allows input from other authors
• Readers can give feedback either in comments or in changes
• People who might feel uneasy in a physical situation are more willing to speak online
• There’s a radical rethinking on how you build a website, by using a wiki — must be very simple
• Book chapters belong to authors under Creative Commons

John Willinsky Teaching English Language Arts

• Raising a generation of “rip, burn, download” with no concept of Intellectual Property
• We need to have educators think about it as “go public”
• Water is Taught By Thirst (EmilyDickenson)
• Using Adbusters in the schools
• They bring materials into the classroom (through the Wiki) that would otherwise never apply — a sharing of IP
• Wiki becomes a cumlative index — class ended in December, but the students are continuing to work and add value
• Students continue discussion with external blogs
• Using software we’ve designed for peer review in the intellectual community for “hot-not fashion“
• “I didn’t come here to learn wikis, I came here to learn to be an English teacher” (student)

Social Software for Learning Environments At Northern Voice

Social Software for Learning Environments

D’Arcy Norman weblogs.ucalgary.ca

• Creation of groups and blogs for learning
• Not a top-down learning environment, created by students
• Self aggregating community

Chris Lott http://www.chrislott.org/wiki/

Chris works as resident “disruptive technologist” at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Center for Distance Education, with a special emphasis on using social software for online learning, specifically to create a rational constructivist learning environment and functional classroom community of learners embedded in the real world community of practice.

• The third space — being an active learner for life
• Students will retain the records and archive for
• We need to disrupt the academy
• Computers are stupid, students are smart
• If the instution sponsors it, it’s a long time committment
• Information fluency is the next step from literacy

Jon Beasley-Murray Posthegemony

• Good to maintain tension between Higher Ed and Blogs
• Students can maintain blogs and disagree
• Critical thinking against the university as much as for it
• Risks of blogs from a tenure perspective “my university would never hire a blogger” attitude
• One of the great promises of blogging is that universities will be faced with student disagreement

Sylvia Currie

• SCoPE Induviduals who share an interst in education, research and practice
• Blogging to enhance the learning experience
• How do you design the experience for education and collaboration?
• Grade 1 and 2 blog from teacher in MooseJaw

Anil Dash at Northern Voice in Vancouver

Listening to Anil Dash at Northern Voice in Vancouver:

• The tools of control go to those who keep the lines of communication open
• Letting go of the ego of “everybody has to come to us
• Using VOX for “your world online”
• anil@dashes.com
• http://dashes.com/anil
• Has anyone every read an entire “New Yorker”?
• Twitter – kind of provides a buddy list for text messaging
• David Snowden in Knowledge Management
• I like the idea that it’s around forever — for my mind, it makes me do better
• People post more pubicly when they can post privately as well

Thinkubator At Northern Voice

Here at Northern Voice in Vancouver I’m sitting in a session on the idea of using a Wiki as a content management system. Pretty cool

There’s an example at Thinkubator.

Northern Voice Blogging Unconference

Today I’m at the Northern Voice Blogger’s conference in Vancouver, B.C.  It must be worth it — I just saw Robert Scoble in the hallway.  As a former Microsoftie, I shook his hand and shared that I had recently left the Borg as well.

 He had no idea who I was.  He’s only met three thousand people since I last saw him, so I don’t know why.

Today is the “unconference” where topics are voted on in the morning, and we all run around during the sessions.  Tomorrow is a little more organized.

 I just met Luke from SocialText.com, who builds and manages enterprise wikis.  He sounds like someone I’ll be able to do some business with.  We agreed that while Sharepoint 2007 does have wiki capability, it was disappointing.  No big surprise.

 Off to a session on community.

D

Is Web 3.0 the equivalent of Web 2.0 for the enterprise?

Harvard professor Andrew McAfee has a great collection of blog posts, resources, examples and other stuff on his  Web 2.0 in the Enterprise wiki. 

“What started out as an exercise to list and categorize Web 2.0 in the enterprise topics expanded into all things Web 2.0 for the simple reason that crossover is inevitable. I also hold a strong belief that the boundary between consumer and enterprise technology is blurring, therefore it would be illogical to exclude purely consumer oriented services and products.”

There are sections on Blogs and Content Management, Collaboration, Voting/Bookmarking/Tagging, Feeds, Media, Statistics, Online Storage and Social Networking.

96 Million “Best Practices” Can’t Be Wrong

I was in an office building yesterday, and saw a big poster for a new initiative that was to provide “best practice” information. 

The funny part was that this was to be provided by “your senior leaders” and the actual worker bees didn’t seem to be involved at all.  Now if you google “best practices” you get more than 96 million hits, so it’s safe to say that nobody even understands what this is, any more.  But I’d like to offer my definition.

1.  Best practices come from the people actually doing the work.

2.  Best practices are not “best” in all situations — context is all.

3.  Best practices are a moving target.

4.  Best practices are only the best you’ve found so far.

5.  Anyone using the phrase “best practices” should be feared.

And in passing, you should know that “blog” currently has 2.5 BILLION hits on Google.  The rest is left as an exercise for the student.

The Adsense Game: Business Learning Using Games

Game-based learning has been the holy grail for trainers ever since they sang their “abc’s” in first grade.  The idea is that if you can get people interested in actually playing the game, the repitition and interaction will create a higher level of involvement — and, in turn, increase the learning.

I just saw a site called The Adsense Game that takes you through the process of creating and configuring an imaginary web site to learn how to use Google’s Adsense tool.  You pick the type of site, add elements, and watch the hits happen and your bank account get fat.

Built by Joel Comm to promte (of course) his book, it’s a really slick and engaging example of adult learning.  The simulation is attractive, tips pop up to help you, and the clean design makes it pretty easy to understand what you’re doing.

Google really needs to write this guy a check.

Just Like Teaching Pre-School — Adult Learners Are Impatient, Easily Distracted, and Learn By Doing

It never hurts to remind people developing any kind of learning content that there are key principles that have been proven over time.  In fact, those of us who have been teaching adults know that there are many parallels between teaching grownups and teaching pre-schoolers.

They don’t like to share, they are easily distracted by shiny objects, and they learn much more easily with their hands on the controls — for example, toilet training.  You can lecture a 2-year-old all day, but put him on the potty seat and you’re headed for success.  Poop happens.

CLO magazine has a great article that expands on this called “Simulations Build on Adult Learning to Accelerate Skill Building and Application” and I’ve posted an excerpt below to make you want to climb up on the rest of the article and do your business.

Simulations Build on Adult Learning to Accelerate Skill Building and Application

October 4, 2006 – Kellye Whitney, Associate Editor

Simulations aren’t a new tool in enterprise learning. As with many of the technologies that have graced the learning stage in the past few years, simulations enjoyed a burst of popularity and attention that subsequently died down. But unlike many of the fly-by-night tech solutions that burst into a short-lived flame, the buzz around simulations still burns and with good reason — simulations are one of the top tools that engage learners and accelerate skill building, as well as the application of new skills and knowledge once employees are back on the job.

“We are seeing an increase in demand for simulations across the board, whether it’s an e-learning simulation, a classroom-based computer simulation or a board simulation,” said Rommin Adl, president and CEO of Strategic Management Group Inc., one of the largest simulation and multimedia training companies in the world. “We’re seeing growth in every single segment that we serve across different practice areas such as business acumen, leadership, project management and sales.”

Adl said part of the reason simulations are still hot is because they align closely with adult learning principles and offer the opportunity to learn by doing in a risk-free environment. Cost, once a huge deterrent to simulation implementation, remains a factor, but it is not as big a worry at the top of the organizational pyramid.

“It links to the strategic nature of learning,” Adl said. “If the learning is linked to some major strategic change initiative, then cost tends to be important, but it’s almost secondary to really creating alignment around the strategic change, whereas, if it’s a curriculum-based or open-enrollment type program, cost is going to be much more of a factor.”   more…