But then again, to misquote Anthony Powell, pixels don’t furnish a room…..

We are currently tackling these issues at my university and, as such, we’ve become very familiar with various providers’ Terms of Service! We’ve been working through many issues to do with risk, liability, business robustness and lots more.

In dealing with IP and copyright, however, we are sure to choose providers that allow users to retain their rights; as Joe says, check out Google … and WordPress and Wetpaint and Ning etc.: they all allow you to retain your copyright and your IP, which we think is important. What they ask for is a sub-licence (or non-exclusive licence) to your IP so that they can display, publish, adapt, translate, etc. your work. If you think about it, this makes sense, as you can’t use the service unless the service has the right to display etc. your work! When it comes to ‘adapting and translating’, again, all that means is that if the service provides a translation facility (as does Google), then, of course, your work might be subjected to that facility by another user. Similarly, if the service had to alter its back-end display defaults (or whatever), then that would count as an adaptation. Reading a Terms of Service is one thing; understanding it is quite another, but it is important that these things >areexclusive< licence to the staff member’s IP, as it does in my institution (our University also takes certain types of copyright from a staff member, but that’s getting down to tin-tacks). Our staff can apply to the DVC for a special exemption but currently there are no automatic approval processes in place to get this exemption in the case of educational use. But we’re working on that

The attitude of our Legal Office seems to be one of ‘it’s here, we’ve got to deal with it, so let’s find ways of keeping the university as safe as we can from risk and liability’, which I think is healthy. What is not so healthy, imo, is either of these approaches: 1) “I don’t understand it, so let’s try to control it by shutting it down” and, 2) “What could possibly go wrong? I’m the teacher and going rogue and bugger the high-ups”. From my perspective, these tools provide us now with ways of engaging students that have for years (let’s go back to Dewey …) been recognised as good pedagogy. To my mind, we therefore have a moral obligation to find ways of making this stuff work — it can’t all just be too hard for us.

As Joe points out, you can start to make thing safe for staff, students and the institution by providing a disclaimer document to users. We are also giving users full briefings on what the Terms of Service that they are signing up for actually mean — and we are doing lots more besides.

Check out some of these links

http://web2survivalguide.wordpress.com/ (especially the ‘important considerations’ area)

http://educationinnovators.ning.com/ (a project I’m currently wrapping up where you can see how some teachers I’m working with are starting to deal with these issues. You can also look at Real Live Examples of student blogs, wikis, social networks etc. by accessing the ‘Members’ sites’ on the left-hand side)

http://www.vp.is.ed.ac.uk/Web_2.0_Initiative/Guidelines (The University of Edinburgh’s guide to all this stuff. We’re working on a similar document at my institution)