Another thing the Auden syllabus provoked was astonishment at the quantity of assigned reading, thousands of pages of classics ancient and modern. But who knows what the Michigan undergrads actually read that semester? Auden’s syllabus is merely a list of readings, without specific assignments. What intrigued me most wasn’t the edufantasy element but the occasion to compare the form of a syllabus of the 1940s with that of our own time. As someone whose job includes writing syllabi, I wondered what the changes in their form tell us.

Some changes are technological. The syllabus of today can be very long. One syllabus of a course taught in my department runs 5500 words, and I have heard of instructors giving syllabus quizzes as incentive to students to read them carefully all the way through. Auden’s was a single page. The tools mostly likely used for producing this kind of document in the ’40s were a typewriter and a mimeograph. Photocopiers would not appear in academic offices before the later 1960s, and computer word processors would not be standard before the 1980s. College instructors often gave syllabi, exams, and other documents needing to be printed to a secretary to type and run off, which would have required more planning ahead than we need today. We might be more likely to make and run off longer documents when it is so much easier to create, duplicate, and distribute them. Technology affords this, but I wonder if we necessarily benefit from the syllabus bloat that is in part a product of our ease of making and publishing documents.

Another change in the syllabus is toward a more legalistic format setting out policies and rewards and punishments that follow from adhering or failing to adhere to them. Auden’s syllabus takes the form of a list, which is consistent with the term’s etymology as a word meaning “table of contents.” Syllabus used to refer not just to documents listing course readings, but more generally to plans of study, in some ways overlapping with the term curriculum. But now a syllabus is considered a kind of contract, and this way of thinking has been promoted in education advice at least since the 1990s. The standard syllabus today contains far more legalistic content than it does bibliographic. It breaks down the course grade and specifies expectations for attendance and penalties for absence and late submissions. It tells you to check your email and to turn off your phone. My university expects a syllabus to state policies for such things as students missing class for a religious observance, receiving accommodation for a disability, and being suspected of academic misconduct. My employer also expects a syllabus to state learning goals, and depending on the class and the requirements it satisfies, these might need to to adhere to specific formulae. The syllabus today is a terms of service agreement, and it should not surprise us if our students skip over many of these boilerplate terms. Do you usually read a ToS or do you just click “agree”?

Some of the legalistic content of today’s syllabus is foisted upon us by university admins, to be sure. I don’t like listing objectives and goals. Can’t the purpose of any course in the humanities and social sciences be assumed to be as obvious as: read the books and articles on the syllabus and try to understand them? But some of this policy-heavy format also is a product of our everyday experiences in the contemporary culture of higher ed. The consumerist character of the university today demands a clear quid pro quo. Students and their families are assuming substantial debt to pay for their degrees, which are seen as essential credentials for the good life. In exchange for their compliance with our expectations, they receive credits toward their degrees.But as instructors, we fashion the syllabus not just to be a clear and binding formula for earning credits. We also use the syllabus to produce our fantasy image of an ideal student, and to hold this up as a standard next to the vast majority of undergrads who fail to live up to all of our expectations in their pursuit of a degree, if not an education. (Maybe Auden was also projecting his ideal student: one with the time and intellectual curiosity to read as much as him.) It sometimes seems that the point of writing a policy into the syllabus is to wave it in the face of the student who fails to follow the ToS. This makes our work petty and bureaucratic as much as enlightening and pedagogical.

So perhaps the biggest fantasy of the Auden (and DFW, Obama, Barry) syllabi isn’t the idea of learning at the feet of the great man or woman. It’s the idea of education unencumbered by the contractual logic of the consumerist college campus. It’s about school being an opportunity to explore exciting ideas rather than merely showing up at the proper place and time, following all of the instructor’s detailed directions, and resisting the urge to text in class.

Lesson 2: Teachers need to be aware that they may be personally liable for their use of copyrighted materials through digital interfaces.[1]

There are a host of factors to consider when reading about this case. First, the plaintiff publishers named the following figures as defendants: the university President, Provost, Dean of Libraries, and the Board of Regents. Individual teachers, though cited by name in the decision and asked to testify at trial about their pedagogical use of publisher-owned materials, were not in this instance directly sued by the publishers. This seems an important item for further discussion. When I asked an attorney whether I may myself be personally liable in the future, I was told by said attorney that I was not named in this case. That is the sole comfort I received as I was seemingly legally bound to participate in this process.  Certainly one presumes a member of the Board of Regents may have deeper pockets than an early-career academic, but the fact that the elite of our university were named in this case does not mean that they are exclusively vulnerable to this type of claim.  The lessons of the individuals sued over Napster remain significant when considering copyright protection.[2]

Every time any attorney addressed me in an email or at the start of a meeting, they called me professor, and every single time I reminded them of my status as a graduate student. I don’t think the lawyers necessarily understood the full implications of my insistence on this distinction, but I felt uniquely vulnerable as a graduate student. While other non-tenured faculty called to testify bore the burden of different professional stakes than tenured faculty members, my status as a graduate student identifies unique risks for a young teacher. In addition to my relative inexperience compared to other GSU teachers asked to testify about our classroom use of E-Reserves, I also question my relationship with the university. Am I an employee with the same protections as faculty? Would the university defend my role in the classroom on an equal level?  Are there deeper dangers in my testimony as someone building a CV and entering the job market? More broadly, to what extent are graduate student teachers being prepared for education in the digital age? Should universities and departments be even more active in mentoring and overseeing graduate student teaching, including advice about the use of digital course sites (from E-Reserves to uLearn to a personal website) and instruction about the requirements for a claim of Fair Use? I voluntarily attended sessions offered through our Center for Teaching and Learning that allowed me to chat with a University attorney and to learn more about copyright issues.  But this is not necessarily typical behavior for extremely busy graduate student teachers. Given the current institutional context in which we live, departments and universities should require more education about copyright law and fair use exemptions for both undergraduates and graduates.

Lesson 3: This case highlights the limits of the symbiotic relationship between academic scholar and the academic publisher.

My use of ‘symbiotic’ implies that we each offer the other something, sharing a mutual dependency. Publishers need content, and scholars need an outlet for their work. Yet is symbiotic too generous a term for a system in which our work is commodified with little or no remuneration for our individual effort? Also consider this next example which is not hyperbole or hysteria—one of the professors called to testify in this case was asked about her classroom use of an essay she herself wrote.  This professor did not hold the rights to her work, though, so the publisher alleged that her provision of that essay for her students through the library’s E-Reserve was a violation of the publisher’s ownership of the content she produced.[3]

At a minimum, I’d like this post to remind any readers entering into a contract with an academic publisher to consider the details of the contract. Do you maintain any ownership rights to your work? Has the contract accounted for digital reproduction and classroom use? Does the publisher have an official policy on what qualifies as Fair Use? Sage, Cambridge and Oxford were the plaintiffs in the GSU case, but academics should demand more equitable terms with any publisher with which we partner.[4]

Some of you may have heard that this week a Georgia judge issued a long-awaited legal decision in a case entitled Cambridge University Press v Mark P. Becker. If you haven’t paid attention to it before, it is important to read up on it now, as the ruling impacts each and every academic and student.

In case you haven’t been following the suit, here’s a quick summary: In 2008, three academic publishers (Oxford, Cambridge, and Sage) filed suit against Georgia State University [GSU] for copyright infringement. At issue was how instructors were using the library’s E-Reserve system—a password-protected site that offered for students scanned copies of chapters from books and journal articles from reading lists for individual courses. After a three-week trial in May 2011 and one year of deliberation, Judge Orinda Evans found GSU guilty of five cases of copyright infringement. That may sound like a loss but in fact GSU was not considered liable or viewed as acting within the bounds of Fair Use for 94 other alleged infringements.[1] You can read the decision here and there are already a few legal interpretations of the decision offered online here and here. There is certain to be more legal analyses of this decision because its implications for broader academic and pedagogical practices may be significant.

In general, there seems to be reason for GSU and other universities to pop the cork on some champagne—the limited “wins” for the plaintiff have likely made future cases of this type more trouble than they are worth. The wider implications of the case, however, are more concerning.

I should note up front that I am not a law student. I’m a media studies doctoral candidate with an interest in policy. Nothing I write here carries with it the authority of a legal degree. Instead, I offer an experiential discourse because I provided a deposition for this trial. I’d really love this post to be a detailed discussion of the deposition process, because I found it fascinating, but as this case will likely continue on appeal, I don’t want to implicate myself further. This concern—my worry of implicating myself—is what I’d like to focus on for the rest of this piece, offered in two parts, sharing a few lessons learned.

Lesson 1: Universities and departments have a responsibility to educate faculty and student teachers about Fair Use and official policy regarding copyright.

Even as we worry that libraries are losing their role as community centers of learning and gathering, Fair Use has infused many of these sites with a new mission. The GSU legal team advanced an argument that our use of digital materials on E-Reserve equaled the placing of hard copies of a book chapter owned by the library on a tangible reserve list. This argument seems persuasive to me, but it demonstrates the thorny issues involved in digitally reproducing materials for instructional purposes. The fact that faculty use of library resources formed the heart of this case should not be read as a validation of similar use of uLearn (formerly Blackboard) and personal faculty websites. Any time teachers upload copyrighted material to a website without adequate attention to Fair Use, they are potentially liable for copyright infringement.[2]

My favorite tidbit about this case is that one dispute between the plaintiff and the defendant centered on the question of what qualifies as a book or work in a Fair Use claim. The plaintiff argued that any numerical interpretation of Fair Use should not include in the page count the table of contents, figures, index, or footnotes. For example, a common perception of Fair Use posits that use of 10% of a book, when that 10% does not constitute the “heart of the work,” may be Fair Use. The 10% here must be calculated against the page total of the chapters only. This struggle over semantics indicates the intricacies involved in understanding the constantly evolving case law of copyright and Fair Use, underscoring the urgent need for a common set of practices across academia, or at least within disciplines.[3] As the GSU case documents, many professors do not share a common understanding of how our university defines Fair Use. Education of our educators is essential.

In the comments, please feel free to offer ideas for how universities can better address the challenges of copyright and Fair Use. Did your pedagogy course address these topics? Does your university host mandatory continuing learning sessions about Fair Use and university policy? Do you partner with an organization that advocates for Fair Use?

In part two of this post, I will address lessons for individual scholars and teachers.

Beginning on Wednesday afternoon with a keynote by Kurt Squire of UW-Madison, a tone was set for the conference — it is no longer sufficient to think of games as mere learning tools or simple entertainment, but to begin to think of games as “possibility spaces,” ripe with potential for driving learning practices beyond the simple conveyance of limited educational content. As was picked up by many of the participants at the conference, Squire exhorted a Montessori approach to thinking of gaming, focusing on how it can open up curiosity in the learner. With such a variety of attendees to the conference, we saw fostering conversations between these many disciplines and professions as a central theme to GLS 6.0.

After a fantastic Wednesday night poster session, Thursday morning began with a joint keynote by Drew Davidson of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon and Richard Lemarchand, game designer at Naughty Dog and co-designer of last year’s award-winning Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. Part of Davidson’s Well-Played series of talks and books, this keynote contained both a careful read of the game, with Davidson highlighting the ways that Uncharted 2 constructed meaning and experiences for the player, paired with Lemarchand’s thoughts on the designers’ goals for each scene/section of the game. This kind of cross-disciplinary, cross-institutional conversation is a hallmark of the GLS conferences, and it was wonderful to see Davidson’s series of these talks now foregrounded as a keynote.

The conference also offered sessions ranging from a social game design workshop led by Eric Zimmerman in which participants prototyped games that could be implemented on Facebook, to empirical studies, such as Rebecca Black‘s report on the constraints to literacy learning presented within virtual worlds for tweens. Sessions on science learning, environmental literacy, governance, computational literacies, and identity were all well-attended, and illustrated the range of topics that games and interactive learning media are being applied to. GLS featured a variety of innovative formats — including “chat n’ frag” interactive sessions, smaller “fireside chat” conversations, and “worked example” sessions. The field is maturing and in what appears to be useful directions, bringing diverse sets of scholarship to the table.

Design was, in particular, a strong theme this year, explored in terms of using games to create valuable contexts for learning, engaging students in design (a topic addressed by Ben Aslinger, among others), the design of commercial video games, and creating game experiences for specific learning goals. This emphasis branched out into research on mobile gaming (UW-Madison’s ARIS platform for the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad was given great focus), fan cultures and productions (addressed by us, as well as Derek Johnson), multimodal forms of literacy, and youth education and development.

The greatest thrill at GLS this year, however, came from Thursday night’s keynote by USC’s Henry Jenkins. As he was presenting at the Fiske Matters conference subsequent to GLS, Jenkins clearly took the opportunity to touch on the applicability of many of Fiske’s themes to games and learning. Thinking of the forthcoming tasks for the games and learning communities not so much as delivering embedded learning content but instead understanding how fandom and the “active audiences” of game cultures are empowered toward social action, Jenkins argued that the playful environments of participatory media are not trivial, isolating forces, but are fostering political engagement and activism around the world.

Overall, we found it to be a wonderful experience, and one in which we were happy to see a broadening of scope and increased diversity in forms of participation. Conference chair Constance Steinkuehler reported that GLS 6.0 was significantly up in attendance over last year’s conference. We hope to see this growing community further come to understand how Squire’s concept of games as “possibility spaces” might be fruitful in developing educational reform, and also in foregrounding learning and literacy as critical approaches for media studies.

To find out more about the conference, see the GLS 6.0 site, or the official Flickr stream.