Sharing the musical love

Source: news.bbc.co.uk

One of the areas that interests me is the point where informal and formal learning overlap in the digital domain. It's something I've been studying as part of my MA in Online Education at the Open University, and it's an area where there's plenty of scope for research and innovation.

With that in mind I was interested to read the findings of a report from the University of Hertfordshire, showing that there's been a slight shift in the attitudes of teenagers towards illegal music downloading using peer-to-peer services. You can read the full facts here.

What is relevant from my point of view is that teens are beginning to accept that there can be a value placed on content and intellectual property. If that change is beginning to occur then we might also see a shift in teens' approaches to greater learning and interaction taking place online.

When Berkhamsted had to shut for a week due to heavy snow in February, we used a Facebook group to keep parents and students in touch with what assignments needed to be done. I was interested to see the degree of antipathy this created - students felt that their space was being invaded by adults. This is one of the problems in bridging the divide between formal and informal learning. There are no explicit ground rules or guidelines for what language to use, which metaphors to apply to the process of online interactions and so on. Perhaps it is the vehicle or technology that's used that's created the tension we experienced?

This is something I'm reading up about at the moment for my MA - and in particular the ideas of social theorist Etienne Wenger. He proposed the idea of communities of practice and maybe what's needed is education for teachers and students alike into how online learning communities should function. Certainly, it's an area I intend to explore from a practical purpose when the new academic year begins in September.

There is a chasm at present between the walled gardens of Virtual Learning Environments, and the free-to-all Web 2.0 open source options that exist in the ever expanding online Cloud that the WWW has become. How educators span that space between what is taught in school and what is learnt elsewhere remains, I believe, one of the great challenges for the near future.

Pirates made to walk the plank

The Pirate Bay story broke at the end of last week, as I was transporting myself back from my home in France to the UK. This week has been somewhat manic at school, as we get ready to bid farewell to our A level Media students, so forgive the tardiness of this post.

In essence, in case you missed it, the Pirate Bay trial saw one of the largest peer-to-peer file sharing services taken to court and its four founders successfully prosecuted for copyright theft.

Their argument, that they weren't hosting the content, merely providing the infrastructure that allowed thousands of users to make file transfers, was rejected by the judge in Sweden. 

As well as large fines all four have been sentenced to a year in prison. An appeal has been launched.

The bottom line is that it's wrong to take work that someone has spent money and creative capital in producing and distribute it for free. It's morally dubious and legally banned.

I am one who thinks there does need to be a radical overhaul of the system - what about a DRM  program that allows users to send content for which they've paid the full price to a friend, who then has to pay a reduced fee for the hand-me-down content? In effect, this generates secondary and tertiary sales, while ensuring the point of sale price is paid for at least once. The increased use of embedded advertising might be another way to make content free to users, but still profitable for content producers. 

Whatever the future system of paying for creative content turns out to be, as I always say to my students, if you can't afford it then you can't have it. I remember having to save up to buy records and PC games as a kid. This generation seems to think they can have it all and screw the consequences. As many of them are planning to go into various branches of the creative media, I'll be interested to see what their views are once their content's been ripped and the cheques are failing to turn up in the post!