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Obama Change Machine’s Next Stop: The Education Industry. Get’em While They’re Young. The Eagle Eye for October 20, 2009

1749 In February, the following appeared in the Newport Town Record:

"A committee was appointed to build a Lighthouse at Beavertail on the Island of Jamestown, alias Conanicut, as there appears a great necessity for a lighthouse as several misfortunes have happened lately for want of a light."

Construction of the first lighthouse, the third in the colonies, began in May and ended in September. Peter Harrison was the architect. The lighthouse was constructed of wood. The tower was 58 feet high to cornice with an 11-foot lantern on top. Abel Franklin was appointed the first keeper.

Several iterations later, this is the tower and out buildings as they look today

Stage one of Administration strategy for success had been engaged:

1. First you identify the problem: the rising cost of higher education.  Get PR for this fact.

2. Then you let the great American public know that you stand in solidarity with them in to reduce  the cost of a college/university education.

3. You move on several fronts to formulate reform plans.

4. You publicize your program for “fixing” said problem using a timeline for announcement.

Now public reaction should be, “How on top of things this Administration seems.”  But this is yet another part of a carefully laid out plan to take over and run another key economic sector of the of this country.

[Obama] wants to increase the discretionary budget for the U.S. Education Department to $46.7 billion, a 12.8%, rise. Obama will save $4 billion a year by ending a long-standing government-subsidized college loan program, in the process beefing up a direct loan program created by President Clinton in 1993 that would make the federal government the only source of federally supported college loans.

The subsidized program, known as the Federal Family Education Loan program or FFEL, dwarfed the direct loan program last year, loaning $56 billion to about 6 million students last year. By contrast, the direct program loaned about $14 billion to 1.5 million students.

The switch would benefit families, said Rich Williams of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, a student advocacy organization. “For years, lenders and banks have been overly subsidized to deliver student loans,” he said.

The Consumer Bankers Association said Obama should revitalize the bank program instead.

“We don’t believe that this proposal, which will increase the federal debt , is in the best interests of students, schools or taxpayers,” said Marcia Sullivan, the group’s government relations director.

Like many other parts of the USA’s faltering economy, FFEL has felt the pinch. Last year Congress created an emergency program for banks that didn’t have capital to lend for the federal loans. On Thursday, Robert Shireman, founder of the Institute for College Access and Success and a senior adviser to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, invoked the classic Monty Python “dead parrot” sketch to describe the program. In the sketch, an irate pet shop customer tries to return a parrot that is dead in its cage.

“In Monty Python terms,” Shireman said of FFEL, “it is nailed to its perch.”

Obama would also increase the maximum Pell Grant for low-income college students to $5,550, in the process making it part of the federal government’s mandatory annual budget. The move would protect it from both political and budgetary pressures. It also would link regular grant increases for students to inflation. Student aid advocates say Pell Grants 30 years ago paid for 77% of the cost of attending college. Now, they say, the grants cover only 35%.

By Marc Parry

Logan Stark’s classmates scramble for courses with professors who top instructor-rating Web sites. But when the California Polytechnic State University student enrolled in a biochemistry class on the San Luis Obispo campus, he didn’t need to sweat getting the best.

It was practically guaranteed.

That’s because much of the class was built by national specialists, not one Cal Poly professor. It’s a hybrid of online and in-person instruction. When Mr. Stark logs in to the course Web site at midnight, a bowl of cereal beside his laptop, he clicks through animated cells and virtual tutors, a digital domain designed by faculty experts and software engineers.

By the time Mr. Stark steps into the actual lecture hall, the Web site has alerted his professor to what parts of the latest lesson gave students trouble. That lets her focus class time on where they need the most help.

Mr. Stark’s class is one of about 300 around the world to use online course material—both the content and the software that delivers it—developed by Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative. If the Obama administration pulls off a $500-million-dollar online-education plan, proposed in July as one piece of a sweeping community-college aid package, this type of course could become part of a free library available to colleges nationwide.

The administration has released only vague statements about the plan. But interviews with a senior Education Department official and others whose ideas have informed the emerging policy suggest how colleges might use these courses—and how Carnegie Mellon, repeatedly cited by officials, might offer a model for the effort.

The government would pay to develop these “open” classes, taking up the mantle of a movement that has unlocked lecture halls at universities nationwide in recent years—a great course giveaway popularized by the OpenCourseWare project’s free publication of 1,900 courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Millions worldwide have used these online materials. But the publication cost—at MIT, about $10,000 a course—has impeded progress at the community-college level, says Stephen E. Carson, external-relations director for MIT OpenCourseWare.

The result is a “huge population of students,” he says, “that aren’t being served.”

Experts see huge potential in serving those students with open courses: To help them explore careers. To give them confidence before returning to school. To improve retention once they get there. To lower the cost of a degree. To spur alternative ways of awarding credit. And to guarantee standards “whether you are in a more impoverished, underserved, or remote area of the country,” says Curtis J. Bonk, a professor in the department of instructional- systems technology at Indiana University and author of the new book .

The plan coincides with Mr. Obama’s goal for the United States to have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020. But Marshall S. (Mike) Smith, senior counselor to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, feels that won’t happen simply by moving middle- and high-school students further through the system. Higher education also needs to rope in older students who never went beyond high school, or who abandoned college before finishing a degree, he says.

“The opportunity to attract those people would be greatly enhanced by having a bunch of really good courses that they could work on in the evenings,” Mr. Smith says, so they could “try out the idea of getting course credit for them—and get hooked.”

Mr. Smith, a veteran of the Clinton- and Carter-era Education Departments, is an open-education evangelist who recently returned to government after serving as education-program director for the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The California foundation has funneled more than $80-million into making digital resources like textbooks and lecture videos freely available on the Web.

Mr. Smith has bigger ambitions still. In January he published an article in the journal laying out the dream of “a 21st-century library” composed of Web-based open courses for high-school and college students. The courses would be laced with multimedia features and personalized with feedback from computer programs that track student performance. The language coming out of the White House and Education Department today echoes some of the concepts in Mr. Smith’s article.

But his article also stacked up the challenges and mixed incentives that the controversial free-knowledge movement must surmount.

Working against open access are “financial concerns, authors’ fears of exposing mediocre content, the weight of traditional practice, and legitimate reasons for protecting intellectual property,” he wrote. “Some publishers and professional academic organizations believe they have a lot to lose” as open educational resources grow more popular.

In an hourlong interview with Mr. Smith focused on many of the details facing the administration as it tries to create an open-course clearinghouse and navigates delicate, still-unanswered questions about what role the government would play in financing and disseminating its contents.

One big question: Who would get the money?

A possible answer, which is not specified in a House of Representatives bill that includes the online proposal, could be an outside laboratory-and-research organization that would receive a block of government money and parcel it out into competitive grants for course development, and then make sure the courses were updated. A community college could house the project, Mr. Smith says. So could a consortium of community colleges, a university, or a nongovernmental group.

The courses created would reach students through multiple devices, such as computers, handheld devices, and e-book readers like Kindles. They would be modular, and therefore easily updated. Both nonprofit and for-profit entities could compete for the money to build them.

The cost of each course: probably about $1-million, although development would cost less “if you did a number of them,” Mr. Smith says.

When asked why government should get involved, Mr. Smith responds that its help “would make those courses available to anyone, which is not the case now—and wouldn’t be the case if the government didn’t do it.”

And delivering them? Here’s one possibility Mr. Smith describes: Macomb Community College, in Michigan, takes an open statistics course and puts it into its catalog. The students don’t meet face to face, but there’s a webinar every week or an open discussion online among the professor and students. Macomb gets the course free, adds value to it in the form of interaction with its professor, and charges for it.

The White House has also pledged that the courses would be made “freely available through one or more community colleges.”

The ways colleges or companies might repackage the courses intrigue one skeptic of Mr. Obama’s higher-education agenda. Richard K. Vedder has called the president’s desire to see all Americans pursue some post-high-school education “an impossible dream.” But the Ohio University economics professor, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, cautiously welcomes the president’s online-course proposal, suggesting an institution could offer a $1,000 degree anchored by the federally developed courses.

A field whose methods haven’t changed much since Socrates taught could benefit from this strategy, Mr. Vedder says.

“With the exception of— exception of—prostitution, I don’t know any other profession that’s had no productivity advance in 2,500 years,” he says. Online, he adds, “is a way to kind of offer a new approach. It’s applying technology to lower costs, rather than to add to costs.”

Mr. Smith describes Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative as a model. The director of Carnegie’s program, Candace Thille, says her goal is “to fundamentally change the way postsecondary education is done in this country.”

As she sees it, the problem has its roots in history. Higher education was originally available to a privileged few. Then the notion arose that college should be accessible to everybody. But the way it was scaled up—putting more people of varying skills and knowledge in front of the lecturer—led to uneven quality and wasn’t very effective.

“Even though we’ve provided access, we haven’t provided access to the same kind of education, because we didn’t really have the tools and technology to scale,” Ms. Thille says. “And I think what the information technology now, finally, is affording us the opportunity to do, is to really provide that kind of personalized instruction—high-quality rigorous instruction—to everybody.”

When the program began, in 2002, the idea was to offer students outside Carnegie Mellon online courses that gave them a shot at learning the same information without any instructor. But researchers have found the material can be even more powerful when combined with live instruction.

Carnegie’s materials have already changed how Logan Stark’s professor at California Polytechnic State University approaches her widely feared biochemistry-for-nonmajors class. Anya L. Goodman used to work from a prepared lecture, starting with the basics so she didn’t lose anyone. Now she puts the burden on students to learn the basics online. She focuses class time on clearing up misconceptions, applying the materials to real life, and working in small groups.

“They’re more attentive,” she says. Especially when she comes in and tells her students, “Here’s what you guys already don’t know.”

Some students dislike the extra work. Mr. Stark isn’t one of them. He wishes others used the format.

And you don’t have to carry a textbook around, he adds.

“Which is awesome.” 

Source: ON MY WATCH - the writings of SamHenry

Let’s get straight the historically profound benefits of making information available online — Scribd this time.

Let’s get straight the historically profound benefits of making information available online — Scribd this time.

Two days ago I wrote about the court decision holding that the video hosting service Veoh is protected by the ”safe harbor provisions” of the Digital Protection Millennium Act from liability if any of the service’s users upload videos that infringe existing copyrights. One of the reasons Veoh is entitled to those protections is that it uses adequate technological safeguards to police the content its users upload.

So I don’t expect

there is much of a chance that a new lawsuit against Scribd, a web site that hosts documents uploaded by its users, will will succeed or even survive a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim, a procedural device that ends the lawsuit at its very beginning by means of a court determination that even if everything the plaintiff alleges is true she is not entitled to legal relief. As Geek.com reports , the lawsuit alleges copyright infringement by Scribd not because it hosts copyrighted materials but because the software it uses to detect copyrighted materials before they are published on the site allegedly uses copyrighted materials:

A children’s author in Texas has leveled a strange lawsuit against the company, claiming that the company infringes copyright, but not by hosting infringing works on its service.

No, her claim is even weirder: she maintains that Scribd prevents copyrighted material from being placed on the site by copying the text of copyrighted books and other publications into its copyright infringement detection software, which therefore infringes copyright itself!

The claim may not be as weird as Geek.com believes, though it is likely not to survive long. The original legal challenge to the Google Books Project by the Authors Guild and individual authors holding who were identified was premised largely on the contention not that Google was going to make those authors’ copyrighted works available. It wasn’t. It was only going to make those works searchable so that snippets could be brought up by researchers who could thereby identify and by library loan or purchase obtain relevant works they never otherwise would have found without traveling from Palo Alto, California to Ann Arbor, Michigan to Oxford, England. So what was the problem? The authors alleged that the fact Google was copying their works in their entirety to create the database that would yield the snippets constituted copyright infringement.

And in , 544 F. Supp. 2d 473 (E.D. Va. 2008), aff’d in part and remanded, F.3d 630(4th Cir. 2009), plaintiffs were students who alleged that iParadigm’s Turnitin plagiarism detection system — used by schools throughout the country to detect plagiarism committed by students — constituted copyright infringement. Schools that use Turnitin require each student turning in a paper to submit it through Turnitin. Turnitin then compares the paper to its database and prepares a report that rates the similarities of the paper to papers in its database. In addition, Turnitin adds the paper it is rating to the database, thereby constantly growing and increasing the effectiveness of that database.

The students alleged that they owned the copyright in their papers and that IParadigms was infringing those copyrights by copying those papers and using them as part of the Turnitin database. But last March the federal court hearing the lawsuit dismissed it.

There are several interesting points to make about the decision. First, I read the trial court decision (that was later affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit) on Scribd ( here ). Scribd is a tremendous resource for me — a lot of legal documents are not available online, and a lot of valuable ones that are available online are behind paywalls even though they cannot be copyrighted (including a lot of court decisions). Scribd is a solution to this problem, providing a central clearinghouse where lawyers can upload legal documents to make them available to the general public.

The value of resources like Scribd is one of the reasons I find criticisms like that Chris Castle directed at the decision in the Veoh case so maddeningly unhelpful. If one looks at sites like Veoh and Scribd as doing nothing but making available for free works that people would otherwise pay for, then it is much easier to rant and rave that those sites are nothing but distributors of stolen merchandise and to rationalize a stubborn refusal to admit that copyright must be balanced against strong competing interests in free speech and the exchange of ideas. But if you see these sites as profoundly gratifying resources that make the internet the greatest innovation in the history of information technology, the fact that media companies (and even independent writers, artists, and musicians) can readily identify infringing uses that do slip through detection programs does not seem so profoundly troubling. Those copyright owners can quickly employ the DMCA’s notice-and-takedown procedures, which many criticize as too friendly to the copyright holders.

Why would you use copyright to stifle marvelous new innovations? Copyright exists to encourage, not stifle, invention.

So a legal attack on Scribd, even if it is not as “weird” as it might seem on first blush, is something I will scrutinize carefully.

Second, it seems odd that Scribd would be attacked for committing copyright infringement resulting from a mechanism it is employing to minimize copyright infringement by its users and for which it is rewarded by the immunity conferred by the DMCA safe harbor provisions.

Third, a spokesperson for Scribd, as Wired reports , explains that Scribd does not copy works in their entirety as part of its copyright detection system; rather, it “creates a digital fingerprint, or a ‘hash,’ to identify infringing copies.”

Most importantly, even if Scribd did copy the entirety of the copyrighted works only to use those copies to prevent users from uploading and making available to readers those copyrighted works, the decision holding that Turnitin’s similar use of copies copyrighted materials to detect plagiarism is illuminating. The trial court, affirmed in this reasoning by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, explained that “iParadigms, through Turnitin, uses the papers for an entirely different purpose [than those the plaintiff did or could], namely, to prevent plagiarism and protect the students’ written works from plagiarism . . . by archiving the students’ works as digital code.” Thus, while the court recognized that iParadigms profits from its use of the student works, the court found that iParadigms’ use of plaintiffs’ works was “highly transformative” because it adds a “further purpose or different character” to the copyrighted works and “provides a substantial public benefit through the network of educational institutions using Turnitin.” Slip op. at 14.

In affirming the trial court’s decision, the 4th Circuit added to this reasoning and described as “clearly misguided” the argument that   Turnitin’s  use of the plaintiff’s copyrighted papers cannot be considered transformative “because the archiving process does not add anything to the work — Turnitin merely stores the work unaltered and in its entirety”:

., 508 F.3d 1146, 1165 (9th Cir. 2007) (concluding that Google’s use of copyrighted images in thumbnail search index was “highly transformative” even though the images themselves were not altered, in that the use served a different function than the images served). [Turnitin's] use of plaintiffs’ works had an entirely different function and purpose than the original works; the fact that there was no substantive alteration to the works does not preclude the use from being transformative in nature.

562 F3d at 639.

So let’s get it straight: what Scribd is doing is of tremendous value to society as a whole. It’s use of copyrighted works to minimize the availability on its site of copyrighted works is entirely different than and in no way diminishes the value of the copyrighted works to the owners of the copyrights. A copyright is not ownership of property like title to a car is — it does not give the owner control over any use of that car the owner doesn’t approve. There are a lot of good reasons for these differences. First, if someone else uses your car, you can’t. If someone else uses your copyrighted work, you can still use it too. If they use it for a use you never would have, what’s your problem? And if that other person’s use is doing a lot of good, why should the law confer on you a power to stop it? (Even your ownership of physical property is limited by restrictions imposed for the social good.) Finally, copyrighted works are works of expression, and we have a constitutional right to free expression. The limitation on copyright imposed by fair use is precisely a means of balancing the copyright holder’s interests against this profound social interest in free expression.

It’s an amazing world. In the name of legal rights that exist to promote progress and innovation, people everywhere are trying to stop revolutionary innovations they plainly don’t realize the value of. One of these days I’ll have to talk about the Google Book Project settlement and the fights raging in connection with it. Some are more legitimate than others. But let’s be clear: Google is trying to make available online for research purposes (not in ways that would displace the markets for the works themselves) the contents of major research libraries from around the world. Doesn’t everyone realize what an amazing and unprecedented advance this is for the life of the mind, for anyone anywhere who ever has had an interest in doing research?

Source: Ruling Imagination: Law and Creativity