French don't fancy punishing file sharers, Fox News does

Two stories have caught my eye.

Firstly, since I'm now working from home in France, I was intrigued to read that the French National Assembly have rejected a proposal, approved by the Senate, to cut off the internet connections of those caught illegal file sharing three times. The proposed legislation would have seen offenders receiving a warning email, then a letter, before losing their access.

The Assembly argued that the proposal might have led to innocent consumers losing their web connections, should a hacker use a legitimate service to download illegally. Thus, an issue about protecting commercial rights has been overcome by concerns for individual liberties. It will be interesting to see how far similar proposals get in other European countries.

Meanwhile, film critic Roger Friedman has been forced to resign from his post as film review for Fox News in the States, after he blogged about using an illegally downloaded version of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Friedman claimed it was easier to do so, rather than haul himself out to a preview screening. Unsurprisingly, both the film studio concerned and his employer saw the situation rather differently.

There's no doubt that the cultural shift towards viewing content as always free, that has penetrated deep into the psyche of youth culture, is spreading into other strata of society. However, the notion of shared public access to content, regardless of who made it and for what purpose, is going to remain a thorny issue for some time to come.  The rise of the read/write web means that many of us now produce multimedia content freely for home use. Educating our young about the entitlement of creative professionals to be able to charge for their creations is one of the challenges facing educators involved in delivering Digital Literacy programmes.

If we fail to make it clear that content can't always be free, then the future of creative industries in years to come may be rather bleaker than we would prefer.

Stephen Fry on Twitter

A nice video post from Stephen Fry about why he likes using the micro blogging service Twitter. For those of us involved in education his final comment, about using Twitter as an interactive source of information, is perhaps the most interesting, in terms of using Twitter within a learning context.

Watch the video, provided by the BBC, here.

The read/write web and students' learning

A fantastic short video, that gives a really good overview of how teachers can use free online interactive tools to empower students to work collaboratively.

Twitter for Teachers

When I first tried Twitter, the microblogging site, a year ago, it didn't grab me.

12 months on and with a greater exposure in the mass media, Twitter is coming in to its own as a way of making connections and doing so in a timely way. 

I've found it most useful as a tool for sharing and gathering ideas between colleagues on the MA in Online Education I've begun at the Open University, and increasingly as a means to find other educators interested in technology-enhanced learning.

One of those people, Laura Walker, has written a good blog post about why Twitter is worth using by school teachers. You can read it here.

Learning via games

An excellent piece from the SXSW digital conference. 

Prof Henry Jenkins, from MIT, is one the great proponents of using videogames into education. 

The following interview is well worth a listen.

It's shot, incidentally, by David Dunkley Gyimah, a friend and one-time fellow videojournalist pioneer at Channel One.