Gautama Mehta’s recent article “Proposal to install spyware in university libraries to protect copyrights shocks academics” is an important read.

A Learning Technology Specialist at UBC was rightly critical of Proctorio so the company is suing him. Considering the ethical, technical or other transgressions of automated test proctoring/surveillance tools like Proctorio, it’s worth thinking about how this situation is unfolding.

Read Shea Swauger’s article, Our Bodies Encoded: Algorithmic Test Proctoring in Higher Education. It identifies deep concerns about algorithmic test proctoring. Right now, with the COVID-19 pandemic forcing everyone to quickly adapt to different ways of doing things, students are facing their final exams.

If you have an interest in learning more about the Creative Commons and open access licensing issues. This year, the Creative Commons began offering an online certificate program, which helps you learn about all things CC. It started as a sort of beta offer but has matured.

This short presentation helps distinguish the idea of a collection of work versus “remixing” and adapting work. This presentation is available as a LibreOffice odp file here.

If we open a Creative Commons licence up, what do we find? Here’s a brief Prezi presentation that gets into the guts of CC licences or a PDF download.

Here are three things about various attributes that can be found in Creative Commons licences, which I find are not necessarily obvious, but good to know (details on the CC site). First, when a CC licence has a NonCommercial (NC) designation, it means, roughly, that employing the work for a commercial use is not permitted. … Continue reading “Some Tips on NC, SA, &

International Open Access Week spans 22 – 28 of October this year. It’s a great time to find out more about open access initiatives that you can both benefit from and participate in. Open Access enables people to learn from a much greater commons of research and knowledge than would otherwise be possible.

Copyright gives the people that create various works, certain legal controls over those works. As the name suggests, it limits copying (thus various forms of usage) to those authorized to do so. Depending on jurisdictions, it also codifies things such as moral rights. The Creative Commons licences simplify an author’s ability to authorize copying and … Continue reading “Briefly, about Copyright Law &

This morning, upon learning of the newly negotiated NAFTA or as it seems to be called now USMCA, I sent the following letter to ministers of the current Canadian government. I appreciate the very difficult and complex work involved in negotiating the new version of NAFTA with the USA and Mexico.