BFTP: A differently moral-ed generation

A weekend Blue Skunk "feature" will be a revision of an old post. I'm calling this BFTP: Blast from the Past. Original post December 23, 2007. As more teaching moves online, the copyright and fair use questions will have yet another layer of complexity. 

If you haven't done so already, jump over and read David Pogue's fascinating article, "The Generational Divide of Copyright Morality." He describes an exercise he conducted with younger audiences saying, "I'm going to describe some scenarios to you. Raise your hand if you think what I'm describing is wrong." His scenarios range from:

"I borrow a CD from the library. Who thinks that's wrong?" (No hands go up.)

 to

"O.K., let's try one that's a little less complicated: You want a movie or an album. You don't want to pay for it. So you download it. ... Who thinks that might be wrong?" Two hands out of 500.

And interesting and informative experiment - one that is probably replicable among "net gen" kids everywhere.

I am not sure that these kids are less moral - only differently moral-ed. A small example:

A few years ago I found the hard drive of my home PC was full. On investigation, I discovered that my teen-age son had downloaded a complete, illegal copy of one of the Lord of the Rings movies. 

When I asked him if he didn't feel it was wrong to deprive someone of his/her livelihood by denying them payment for their creative property, he replied:

"But Dad, I paid to see the movie in the theater - twice. I will buy the DVD as soon as it comes out. And I will probably buy a deluxe edition when that comes out in a year or so. Just HOW am I not paying for this?"

I am not sure I agreed with his argument, but it was nice to know he was thinking about the ethical implications of his act.

While I have no ethical problems with DRM techniques (to the chagrin of at least a few of my readers, I'm aware), I don't think that copy-protection will not be a long-term viable solution.

And I still don't understand any economic model in which creators are compensated for their work when all their songs, books, software, etc., are easily attainable without payment (stolen).

Options for online storage - what do I use when?

... curation—choosing what to save, where to store it, how to update it, and when to recall it—is more than a response to information overload, but a 21^st century skill all of its own. Terry Heick

Over the past couple months, I've given my Schools in the Cloud workshop and the questions always comes up, "Do I need both Dropbox and Evernote? Do I need both Dropbox and GoogleDrive? I get the concept of why it's good to have my documents stored in the cloud so they are available and synched to all my devices, but really, why do I need so many options?" I hear these questions as a tech director from those in my own district as well.

These aren't bad questions and are similar to ones that have come up before in our district related to sharing and collaborative editing of documents and publishing instructional resources and digital communication options. So here we go again.

Here is how I use each of these tools and how you might decide if they are for you as well:

Evernote. i love Evernote and have been using it for a number of years. It's my sticky note-replacement, scrapbook, to-read pile, and curation tool of materials on topics of interest. I always put a copy of tickets for events, hotel reservations, and boarding passes in Evernote. The Clipper add-on for the Chrome and Firefox browsers work great and the app for iOS works nicely on both my phone and iPad. I put "standard responses to commonly asked questions" in Evernote notes, such as driving directions to my office. For me, Evernote is best used to capture materials written by others, stored and organized and for keeping short messages that are readily accessible. I suspect I have only scratched the surface of what Evernote can do.  

Dropbox. I also love Dropbox and have been using it as my primary storage/backup solution for a couple years. I pay the $80 or so a year which provides me with a 100GB storage space that allows me to keep ALL my files (not programs) in folders within the Dropbox folder on my computers. This assures me of an automatic back up each time I change or add a file. I've grown to appreciate the ability to share big files like PowerPoint slideshows using the Public folder in Dropbox too. So for me, Dropbox is best used to store anything I would normally store on the hard drive of my computer, organized as I would store it on my hard drive - and to share files too big to send as e-mail attachments.

Google Drive. Google Drive, the resource formerly known as Google Docs, for me has primarily been a means of creating, storing, and sharing materials I have created using Docs in the free 5GB of space (GoogleDocs do not count against the allowance). With the change from Docs to Drive, this tool now behaves more lke Dropbox, permiting the storage of multiple file types, not just Docs.  For those new to online file storage, this might be a good alternative to Dropbox if one needs more than the 2GB of storage that comes with Dropbox's free version but less than the 100GB of storage of the paid version. There is a Google Drive desktop version so files can be pushed into a desktop folder. There is also now an "official" Drive extension for the Chrome web browser so one can right-click on images and webpages for storage in Drive - so, perhaps Drive will replace Evernote for some people as well.

There are lots of other online storage tools as well, but these are the most popular. What do you think - what clarification or advice to give others when they are confronted with a choice of storage options? 

Apologies

I just discovered this morning that I was not receiving e-mail notification when a comment was added to my blog - so I have not been approving comments or replying. Hope to get this issue resolved this morning. Doug