Swifties, Patents, and Anti-bullying
Teaching students about the media, patents, and media literacy
Taylor Swift and Tim Berners-Lee…
…make strange bedfellows. You see, copyright discussions are interesting, so I like to use something current. When I discuss ‘rights’ it takes us into intellectual property issues, and patents.
Taylor Swift’s creative move to retrieve her Intellectual property rights, by re-recording “Taylor’s Version” of her music in a great pace to start. A girl with a guitar dueling with a record company called Big Machine. (Interesting name, especially at a time when people are genuflecting to ‘machines.’)
She has even trademarked her hashtags. Apparently you can!
The discussion was a precursor to what these students are currently working on. A presentation with a big research component into patents. Tim Berners-Lee famously didn’t patent his idea for the World Wide Web. He could have. If he did he could purchase countries. (Jeff Bezos’ wealth would be pocket change.)
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How to Conduct Interviews
We didn’t need TikTok to tell us that one is never too young to produce ‘media.’ In August I began training my students to produce stories in our Media and Publishing class. It seems easy at first: Prepare good questions, get good answers, right? Not often the case. Sometimes the story you really want is buried in the story you planned. Often, you must peel the layers. Let the interviewee meander a bit, until he or she reveals that nugget of information that doesn’t get out by who-what-when-where-why interrogative questions. There’s also serious editing required. And so they wrote. And edited. And revised. Here’s what their first take looked like went to print a 11x17 broadside. (Click on the image to see the whole thing as an eNewspaper.)
For my own work, I looked into some alternative ways to get the story-within-the-story. To peel the onion, so to speak. I discovered two sources that gave me new insight. One ancient, and one brand new.
Ancient: Legendary BBC journalist, David Frost, had an peculiar interview technique. If you’re curious, Frost is the one who got Nixon to practically apologize for his mistakes on camera. Watch Frost’s interview of Richard Nixon.
I followed a webinar by EdWeb on teaching news literacy in the classroom. I was taken up by their nuanced discussion of bias. It’s a slippery topic, as of of the presenters, Indira Lakshmanan said. (She’s reported from places such as Bosnia, Afghanistan and Cambodia. ) We tend to think bias is political, but that’s just one slice of bias, she says. There are five types of biases. Five! They are (a) Partisan bias (b) Demographic bias (c) Corporate bias (d) Neutrality bias and (e) something called ‘Big Story’ bias. Moreover Bias and Subjectivity are not the same thing.
RELATED FUN FACT: One of my students swears that the BBC is the best news network! I hadn’t realized that (a) The BBC was even popular here in the US, and (b) Young people do care about well-produced news. You learn something every day!
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Microsoft’s Terrible Terms of Service. Written by a bot?
What do you make of this legalese? Microsoft doublespeak. It should decide if it doesn’t ‘own’ our content, or if they sort of do. They sent me a link. They seem to have it both ways.
Who writes this stuff? Who proofreads this? Or is this nonsense generated by ChatGPT, and therefore not subject to checks and balances because, Oh, hey, we trust AI more than human editors.
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Rosevelt Rawls, our Guest Speaker in September.
I invited a teen ambassador for child safety, Rosevelt Rawls, to my class to speak to students about safeguarding privacy when online. Rawls has her own non-profit organization, Music and The Message, that enables her to talk to schools about this and other issues confronting young people. All this while in high school - online.
I met her through a friend at church, after the movie, The Sound of Freedom. She addresses online bullying, and oversharing in social media head on. And of course she sings, as you will see in the video here. Hey - I am now doing some rudimentary video editing, thanks to my son, Aaron, who’s inspired me.
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Speaking of video, so many editing choices!
I have finally grown comfortable editing video using Davinci Resolve. I have tried a few others and have gravitated back to Resolve, even though it’s a complex affair. Makes my head hurt at times to find out the workarounds. (I turn to my son for tech support!) But if you’re looking for some options, here is a shortlist I have tried:
Adobe Express - Free online editor
Canva - the uber graphic design tool has a wonderful web-based video editor. Limited features but terrific footage, and intuitive editing
Capcut - I haven’t tried this. One of my students highly recommends it.
OpenShot - a free download, with many tutorials like this. Slightly glitchy.
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Patents that wow!
I began with this topic so I’ll wrap up with this. While showing students how to research patents this week (via Google’s patent database patents.google.com) I came across this. It’s searchable Here. A wearable mouse, for heaven’s sakes. I hate trackpads. I always use a mouse. But this one - for someone who refuses to wear a Fitbit?
(FUN FACT: The first mouse invented in the eighties had one button, and two perpendicular metal discs in its undercarriage. It was designed by Douglas Engelbart.)
And yes, it was patented, if I may stick to the theme of this newsletter.
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Hope you found this useful. I publish this as proof of concept to help me demonstrate what I teach, and to sharpen my own editing skills. Thanks for reading this far!.