Site Strategy and Progress
Work on our second ISO downloadable CD was set aside in favor of a competing project. Look for links to the second ISO CD next month in this "Site Strategy" category.
Competing Project
I volunteered to present a seminar for the University of Texas at San Antonio's (UTSA) Small Business Development Center. Check the November listing for a schedule and description of the seminar.
Originally, the proposal was to be directed toward assisting non-profit organizations is their Web design, Web development Web and project management. But the UTSA SBDC preferred that I gear the seminar project toward the issues that affect small business owners.
Seminars Offer Inadequate Training
Seminars offer the same limited learning opportunities that Classroom Toolkit addressed in our article on the Start of School In-Service program. See the July 2006 article, Professional Development: Fast-Track to Empowerment or an Energy-Sapping Seat-Time Rut
So, this seminar was designed as a "Walk the Talk" demonstration of each of the concepts that will be addressed. The presentation itself is a "Website", except that the font sizes are large, making the results similar in appearance to a Microsoft™ PowerPoint slide show.
The Website style design makes the presentation a level of magnitude more flexible than a linear slide show. Developing and fine tuning this presentation format was important since I plan to use the template for the workshop that I will be delivering for the Texas Computer Education Association (TCEA) conference in February 2007.
Seminar Follow Up
The other issue plaguing In-services, seminars and workshops is a lack of "follow up" learning activities.
This seminar addresses this issue in two ways:
- A handout CD with resources and tools that can be reviewed and studied after the seminar
- An online, interactive tutorial system that reinforces the same attitudes, knowledge and skills that were presented in the seminar.
The draft of the handout CD is online. Check for revisions on November 7 and again at the beginning of January 2007. (The seminar will be repeated again at that time.)
Link to the Building a Bodacious Web Presence Handout CD.
The second follow up resource is the interactive, online tutorial. This tutorial uses the Moodle!™ Open Source product.
View the framework for the seminar follow up at...
Link to the Building a Bodacious Web Presence follow up interactive, online tutorial.
Time Consuming Tutorial Development
Course development experience with Moodle!™ has lead to a rethinking of the Classroom Toolkit position on teachers using this product for their classrooms.
Development work with Moodle!™ is so time consuming that we now recommend that teachers do not create Moodle™ courses without first obtaining copyright and intellectual property rights guarantees in writing from their school district employer.
Intellectual Property Rights and Copyright Law
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) is working to protect the intellectual property rights of university employees. But progress on this is slow because Universities want to grab all the intellectual property they can. (We live in an "Information Economy", after all. And information means money. Some Universities and School District executive management folks prefer that their organizations grab and hold the rights to this information, whether or not their organization had any involvement in the creation of that information, or whether or not the employee who created that information is ever compensated.
The AAUP argues that work-for-hire does not include faculty intellectual property. Federal court decisions, traditional academic practices, and notions of academic freedom all support the rights of faculty to retain ownership of their work as original authors.
Source: http://www.udel.edu/aaup/news/newsletters/2006/September.html
Of course, the Kansas Supreme Court ruling stated that copyright ownership of university professor's intellectual property had to be determined on a "case by case basis."
Of course, this ruling was in Kansas and directed at the University Level, but shows promise that teachers may one day retain intellectual property rights.
However, before posting tutorials while in the employ of a school district, Classroom Toolkit recommends that you seek the counsel of your attorney for specific laws in the state where you work.
And, with the elections upon us, bringing this "intellectual property acquisition by fiat" loophole (i.e., organizations claiming intellectual property rights to your uncompensated work) to the attention of your elected officials could be a strategic move to protect your long-term rights.
