Wed 31 Oct 2007
Could someone please tape these lectures by Math Professor Edward Burger? Why wouldn’t the College want to make this wonderful event available to all of us who live far away from the Purple Bubble? I realize that the Office of Public Affairs may be too technologically backward to put this up as a podcast without any help, but surely someone (faculty or student) in the Math Department would be willing to lend a hand. Innumerate alumni of all ages are crying out for math instruction!
October 31st, 2007 at 10:57 pm
I could be wrong, and/or Burger may be in favor of distributing them as a podcast, but don’t professors own the rights to their lectures?
(IIRC, this issue came up during the early phases of the Mark C. Taylor / Herb Allen GEN thing.)
November 1st, 2007 at 2:39 am
PCE:
If the professor had a positive objection, I think that’d certainly be a problem.
Several years ago, I and a few friends at Berkeley recorded and ‘cast guest grad seminars at Berkeley, before there was ‘podcasts’, primarily in the belief that undergrads in related courses would listen to them. And in fact, they did. The professors did not seem to mind.
At this moment, I have no interest in the morass of copyright law on such an issue. However, last I checked, Mass. has a rather restrictive public recording law, that would almost certainly technically prohibit recording a forum without the knowledge and prior consent of all parties.
In things Williams especially, I am a proponent of “don’t ask for permission, act” and would have recorded MS’s alum weekend presentation and made it available without asking anyone if it had been practical. For other presentations with professors, I likely would have asked and not violated their preferences. The two contexts are different and IMO MS is acting in a public role that professors are not, …
Which gets us to interests and values and balances, …: there’s something very different between distributing recorded lectures as part of a formal, for-profit economic endeavor such as GEN, and distributing them as part of an individual, person-to-persons ad hoc effort. This is roughly an open source principle: the rewards should accrue to expanding the tool/knowledge base and the processes of doing so, not in controlling the production/tools/knowledge itself.
WRT the above, I started scanning and reading everything on a laptop… also well over a decade ago, after picking up a professional Xerox document scanning system and many other experiments. It pleases me greatly to see that almost everything at Belmont, and quite a lot at Vanderbilt, is scanned and distributed electronically– not as a systematical institutional effort per se, but because the technology and infrastructure has been made readily available to “do it yourself.” I am somewhat dismayed that Williams does not seem to be doing something similar.
In the end, though I like Williams podcasts, I do not believe we need centralized and controlled system: we need effective, lightweight systems and technologies that let people share knowledge, conversations and “content.” (I stumble on using buzzwords). And as I’ve believed that for two decades or so now through debates and discussions with Mark and Ted Nelson and etc., I’m painfully aware of how few teeth such a general statement has without delving into specifics.
To delve a little, it dismays me that syllabi are now available online at Williams, but not at least to alumni. What I want to do is know who is assigning the 18th Brumaire to Peter and in what context– and for no other reason, than I want to be in a roughly similar position as Frank Oakley catching me reading the Harlean Miscellany in Pappa John’s, and wondering who was assigning it, how, why, in what context. Such ‘rich knowledge’ is what makes our community: it let Frank know more about where I might be in my intellectual journey, and know more about the conversation going on around him.
I once spent quite a lot of time hopping around the globe to do that– and still do in a manner of sorts. My point is that transparency and availability, all else aside, strengthen such processes and extent “what we’ve always done” “in a global society.” (The last also being too buzzwordy.) Rather than threatening, however, or “utopian” and grandiose, I see them as preservationist practices amid an era in which changes erode and dismantle the effects of ‘traditional’ ways of conducting our business, such as Oakely’s practice, above.
More than you asked, and too much of my personal jargon… and needlessly (auto)didactic besides. My apologies for all those.