Here in Hyderabad at the IGF I just got done listening to a panel titled “Overcoming Obstacles to Effective Digital Education” and while that is ostensibly a great idea for a panel, this one focused on “ examining a broader set of issues including: roadblocks stemming from protections of intellectual property…” In other words, the panel started with the assumption that Copyright is a major roadblock to effective digital education. Most of the panelists listed on the link above were not there, but what we did have was an interesting mix including one from Yale’s Internet Society project, Geidy Lung from WIPO, a scholar from China’s Beijing University, an actual teacher (!), and Eddan Katz, Electronic Frontier Foundation.

It was unfortunate that the panelists had to jam their presentations into this narrow concept of Copyright as a roadblock because it prevented the more important discussion about how the internet has changed how we define digital education. Simple things like the way we view a student teacher relationship is now moving beyond “teacher in a classroom” and exploring all the ways that students can learn. Copyright issues just seem like an afterthought to the larger questions of what ‘effective digital education’ will entail.

In fact the opening presentation by a representative of the Yale Information Society seemed to reveal just how much was missing. His presentation looked at the meaning of digital education and what were the roadblocks:

4 main opportunities —

  • Digital education allows students and teachers to bridge distance and time
  • It expands access to materials for both teaching and learning
  • creates new methods
  • moves us beyond “student in a classroom”

4 main roadbocks

  • economics infrastructure. instead of developing new networks, use existing
  • cultural challenges. digital education looks different. for some communities, they need to recognize the benefits.
  • institutional challeges.
  • legal challenges. Law can be constructed in ways that constrains. How do they allow both?

As you can see, the copyright legal questions are kind of thrown in to meet the topic, because I think the speaker understood that the potential of Digital Education dwarfs whatever copyright concerns may be out there.

It would have been interesting to learn more about the use of Digital education in China, but instead, we had the representative from China give us a talk about how a recent court case on copyright in China would allow a Chinese tech company to steal content from an English copyright holder so long as there was some educational use. The core issue was that a book called “New Concept English”, a premier english language textbook series, was copied onto a CD and an audio track was added to allow the student to read along while hearing the words. Pretty standard fare, but quite valuable. Mind you this was not a product developed to improve education writ large, but rather a for-profit product. But instead of taking a license, or even writing their own textbook, the Chinese company instead just copied it, and then claimed in court that it was ‘ok’ because it was for educational purposes. It seems horribly unfair that the company producing the disk gets to take home all the cash when their entire product is built on someone else’s work. At least with GPL’d works, no one gets to charge for it. Worse still, the Chinese court decided that it wasn’t actually a “reproduction” on the disk – this just seemed like opportunistic xenophobia. The Representative left the meeting before Q&A, so there wasn’t any opportunity to clarify these points.

But really, the hardest job fell to the WIPO representative, who was forced into the awkward position of discussing how the exceptions in copyright treaties really promote the educational use of copyrighted material in digital education. She did a solid work, but he exceptions themselves only help to prove the main problem with this whole panel: Copyright issues are just not that big a barrier to effective digital education.

As the only actual Teacher on the panel said: ‘teaching is the most important thing, and educating teachers is a far more significant roadblock’.

So setting up a panel discussion that assumes copyright is a significant burden creates a problem for the panelist – trying to justify a false conclusion.