Cory Doctorow’s PWNED class finishes the term

by billso on Saturday, 26 May 2007

Cory Doc­torow has posted a wrapup announce­ment about his copy­right course at the Uni­ver­sity of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, with links to sev­eral stu­dent projects.I first heard about Cory’s course on Boing­Bo­ing, a blog that he edits. The Chron­i­cle of Higher Edu­ca­tion ran an arti­cle about Cory on April 6. I didn’t fol­low the class blog or Cory’s pod­casts very closely over the term, as I had 4 grad­u­ate sec­tions of my own to teach, along with my own writ­ing for this blog.Of all the stu­dent projects in the course, my favorite is teachingcopyright.org. This site by Richard Esguerra helps Cal­i­for­nia K-12 teach­ers ful­fill that state’s require­ments for tech­nol­ogy grants. I’ll take a look at the site and try to use some of this mate­r­ial in my fall courses.Cameron Parkins did an inter­est­ing project on the restric­tive copy­right poli­cies of USC’s School of Cin­e­matic Arts. USC asserts copy­right over stu­dent films, and dis­suades stu­dents from post­ing their work on the Web and sites such as YouTube. I’m sur­prised by Parkins’ asser­tion that SCA fac­ulty and staff avoid dis­cussing this pol­icy with stu­dents. His white paper attempts to address these problems.I hope that Crys­tal Larsen’s exam­i­na­tion of Major League Baseball’s press cre­den­tial­ing pol­icy results in some changes. As we approach another sea­son of steroids and vio­lence, MLB needs all the good press it can get. Cre­den­tial­ing blog­gers would pro­vide base­ball fans with some inter­est­ing reading.I do agree with RobotSkirt’s com­ment about Cory’s announce­ment: Cory’s stu­dents may have done some excel­lent work, but “bril­liant” seems a bit extrav­a­gant for an under­grad­u­ate COMM499 course.

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