While fanfiction has been around for decades, the Internet has provided a new gathering place for fans to share their passion and creativity with others.  As we have seen in class, remix culture is entering into mainstream consciousness and “remix literature” will undoubtedly begin to play a bigger part as well.  However, because fan work violates the current laws protecting copyright and has been subject to cease-and-desist, the fan community has an uneasy relationship with publishers and original copyright owners.

In the past, fans often congregated around centralized archives, such as fanfiction.net.  Currently, much of fan activity has moved to LiveJournal and LiveJournal communities.  While great for authors, allowing them to have better control over their content, it has lead to the decentralization of fanfiction and an increasing difficulty of navigating each community.

Our solution, FicBound, would serve to provide a platform for discovering new fanfiction to those new to the community, as well as provide the community tools for rating and organizing fanfiction.  Structured much like Digg, FicBound would be adapted to the fanfiction community’s needs, thus integrating social as well as publishing and sharing elements.  The content itself would remain on the LiveJournal and archive accounts of the users, thus allowing them to maintain full control.

FicBound hopes to build on Clay Shirky’s insight that “Conversation is king.  Content is just something you talk about.” While recognizing the difficult issues surrounding fanfiction, we nonetheless hope to build an useful platform to facilitate conversations around content for fans.

For those who wish to view our paper in full, please go to: https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AYPnJLMOxStCZGhwZDJzczRfNDk0YzkzMm5mZjU&hl=en

– Eric and Crystal

The internet has made it easier to access, share, and create content. This truism has huge implications for education; with access to the Web, educators and students have escaped the confines of the classroom. The ability to share lesson plans, collaborate on lessons, and peer produce projects is exciting—but with it brings many potential effectiveness issues, infrastructural issues, and copyright issues.

We interviewed teachers at Amistad, a New Haven charter school, regarding their thoughts on collaborative education and fair use, and gleaned interesting insights. After examining their comments and doing some research, we broke down collaborative education into three main systems, and analyzed each: An intra-school-network system of sharing lesson plans; a system where teachers sell lesson plans; and a system where teachers share lesson plans freely. Each system had quite a few pros and cons.

Alongside Nick Bramble at the Yale ISP, we submitted these analyses to the FCC. We also worked with Nick to help draft a piece addressing fair use issues in education. With new technologies and no clear rules, fair use in education is a topic that must be addressed and made clearer. With regards to our project, sharing materials and lesson plans online creates a vibrant atmosphere that, unfortunately, is setting itself up for abuse/lawsuits. If educational copyright issues aren’t made clearer, the potential that this peer-to-peer atmosphere creates may be stifled.

To see some of our contributions, check out this document (.doc).

Yale has always been committed to the open dissemination of knowledge, and the university has used begun to use recent advances in technology to distribute information easily and efficiently — for example, through open courses Yale is freely making many of its classes available online. However, as it stands professors are the primary benefactors of this technology, and students don’t have similar institutional support to share their own important work with the world. To further the goal of dissemination of knowledge as well as to allow students to participate in this global forum, we started a project to record videos of senior presentations in the twelve college’s Mellon Forums and then make them freely available online.

The Mellon Forums provide seniors with an intimate setting to present their thesis work to a group of their peers over dinner and dessert.  These forums are already an important platform for seniors to present their thesis research by giving them time to present and openly share their work with their classmates — otherwise most seniors’ research would be mostly hidden from view. One limitation of this, however, is that by their nature the forums must be small and presentations are given to a very restricted audience despite the fact that many people (friends from other colleges and years, family, and curious outsiders) are particularly interested in the work these students are doing. Putting videos of these presentations online would not only make this knowledge available not only to other students, but also to all the world. Taping a presentation might make it slightly more formal, but it also heightens the energy and impact of the presentation. And further, recording these presentations sends the message to students that yes, their research really is important enough that the university believes it is worth showing to the world.

Check out our site here. We’ll continue updating it!

-Evin, Paul, & Paulo

Alex and I went to Hillhouse High School to teach students who were in an educational law class. We designed the lesson to be discussion oriented, and we tried to focus on issues we have looked at over the course of the semester that affect them—like Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, and fair use. It went really well, and we think that they came out of the class with a better understanding of important issues they might not have considered before. It was also a very eye-opening experience for Alex and me. We had to simplify what we had planned to say, because they had less background knowledge than we had expected. Most of the students had never used Wikipedia, and only some of them had a Facebook account.