Some of the key areas that the Administration is exploring include:

• How might web-based games spur development or help to deepen the ties between the US and the Muslim world?
• Can games tackle major ed challenges – learning readiness, dropout rates, literacy, STEM
• Topical priorities: STEM, child obesity, adult basic skills, youth entrepreneurship, energy audits

As far as the power of games, Noveck mostly focused on virtual technologies, noting that “seeing oneself on the screen is critical… When we see ourselves – what does that mean for our ability to coordinate socially? What does it mean for decisionmaking and peacemaking?” She notes that it’s “amazing” to be able to sit in certain White House meetings where everyone is at least familiar with the concept of World of Warcraft. (No one asked if Obama himself is among them)

Weighing in on a long-standing argument in the “Serious Games” movement, Noveck noted that “serious games” should neither mean dull nor pedantic. She does state, as do many educators speaking to learning, that there ought to be many means of civic engagement as there are people who want to engage, so that there’s not just one single path to getting involved.

Noveck also spoke to strategies for how the government can undertake these initiatives, specifically, how to foster partnerships or other mechanisms (contests?) and how to measure impacts and outcomes. One recurring issue whenever White House technology is discussed is how the government can afford to take the risk of experimentation, especially given that gaming is considered highly risky (thus the need for the “serious games” appellation). One of the strategies is likely to foster “copycats” who improve upon the rudimentary experiments that the White House fosters, which Noveck says is already happening. At a minimum, there is hope that the CTO’s office can be a hub of innovation where civic-minded people and organizations can gather to share innovative ideas and make them happen — perhaps even, Noveck suggested in answer to a question, a “center for gaming.” (”Let’s talk,” she said to the questioner).

Related posts:

• Video Games and Democratic Participation
• My.BarackObama.com – 2008 Game of the Year

Cross-posted at Valuable Games

Note that on Facebook law schools should set up “pages,” not “profiles,” so that students are “fans” rather than “friends” and therefore are shielded from sharing their private information with schools. However, professors are likely to have profiles, not pages. Of particular concern is that schools not inadvertently violate FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) by disclosing information about students through lax or careless privacy settings. What happens, for example, if a prof sets up a “group” for students in her Torts class, and students begin discussing class topics without realizing that the group is semi-visible to others?

For anyone interested in this topic and other issues related to social media amd law schools, please come to the dedicated workshop at the CALI Conference for Law School Computing.

The Social Media Best Practices Workshop builds on the work of Laura Bergus (Iowa College of Law), who felt that her own school was accentuating the negative and ignoring the positive value of online social media. Ms. Bergus, a guest blogger on Social Media Law Student, began a campaign to reform her school’s policies and won the buy-in of her administration. This triggered the thought that other schools might also be seeking better policies and guidelines for their students.

Our goal for the Workshop is to generate best practice suggestions for law schools. We also hope to start a nationwide discussion among law schools on how to approach social media and its potential interaction with students’ current performance and future career prospects.

Professor John Palfrey (Harvard’s Vice Dean of Library and Information Resources), who is a keynote speaker at the conference, will be contributing to this workshop. Prof. Palfrey is co-author of Born Digital and known for his expertise on both the perils and promise of social media for young people.

Steve Langerud, Assistant Dean for Career Services for Iowa College of Law, will also be joining the workshop. Dean Langerud has been working closely with Ms. Bergus on developing new media guidelines for their school.

Sign up now for the 2009 CALI Conference for Law School Computing®.

[Correction: Laura Bergus is not "Social Media Law Student;" that's Rex Gradeless at SLU Law -- Laura is a guest blogger on that site. Thanks to Jim Milles for pointing this out.]

In this presentation, Professor Eric Gordon (Emerson College) and Gene Koo (Berkman), together with the staff of Hub2, will describe Hub2’s progress and challenges in working this summer with the North Allston neighborhood to participate in the design of Honan Library Park, which Harvard University is redeveloping as part of its larger Allston project. Joining this presentation will be the youth interpreters who have helped less technologically adept neighbors access the Hub2 technology and who in turn have learned to build and code in Second Life as well as understand urban planning.

Find out more and RSVP

A basic dilemma facing educational fair use is that it’s stuck between too much specificity (cutting out potentially fair uses) and too much vagueness (leading teachers to avoid risk by stopping far short of fair use). To the extent that specific guidelines are available, they’ve been shaped by the publishing industry and drafted without serious input from users (input letters not published), lack legal standing (court in a coursepack case argued need to go back to the copyright statute itself), unclear if they are minimum or maximum allowed (NYU, under litigation threat, treated guidelines as max, now followed by 4 of 5 universities.

What can be done?

1. Give up on fair use altogether
2. Create guidelines: The status quo
3. Develop best practices: Get use communities to articulate their discipline’s norms around fair use. See the documentary filmmakers.

Lewis now advocates the third path, putting emphasis on the process of involving community rather than the legal requirements imposed by the law. The point would be that the community develops its own norms and establishes common-sense fairness before checking for legal acceptability. The next critical step would be winning buy-in from the entire community, especially those who might otherwise stand in the way.

John Wilbanks of Science Commons suggested reframing the issue as “The Right to Teach,” which strikes me as an incredibly powerful way to assert the positive value of fair use (which, after all, is a negative cutout of copyright).

I mentioned that for eLangdell, a legal education commons at CALI and backed by Berkman, would love to be part of a pilot project to identify best practices and be protected by any litigation defense system that can be set up in connection with these practices.

UPDATE: Second Life location (Emerson Island); Backchannel

Here’s a tentative outline of the topics we’ll be covering:

1. Introduction
1. Panelists introduce themselves briefly
2. Primer: What’s a virtual economy? MMOs: Drew Harry. Web: Burak Arikan. Second Life: Scott Kildall/Victoria Scott.
3. Primer: Virtual property and currency. Drew.
4. Primer: Making real-world money in virtual economies. Scott/Victoria.
2. Where, in virtual economies, is value generated, and by whom? Who’s capturing that value?
3. How is value flowing from the real into the virtual? How is value flowing from the virtual to the real? What do you see in the immediate future of these flows?
4. How would you place virtual economies on a historical scale? In what ways do they reflect feudal, capitalist, communist, or other ideal types of historic economies? In what ways are they sui generis? How might a legal regime premised on the physical economy hinder the development of a virtual one?
5. Talk about the labor market within virtual economies. What does it mean for participants to be generating “immaterial labor”?
6. Is value shifting from traditional products (property) and services to the relationships themselves? What does that mean for participants in the economy — both individuals and the corporate entities? Is “alienation of labor” giving way to the potential for “alienation of relationships”?
7. Is our language of “production” and “consumption” outmoded in a virtual economy? If so, what language should we be using?
8. What issues arise at the intersection of economics and politics, particularly given that virtual worlds, unlike most modern real-world states, do not have direct accountability mechanisms to their inhabitants?
9. How does the real-world business model of the company running a virtual world interact with the virtual economy itself? Have we found the “right” way to match these two systems?
10. Normatively, how do you think a fair economy would operate in virtual worlds? What’s missing in them now, and what steps need to be taken to get to a fairer relationship between world-manager and user?

—-

The Internet will become increasingly important in supporting and sustaining our civic communities. 3D virtual worlds illustrate how advances in technology will make that happen, and online games within those worlds are a harbinger of our potential future civic life.

I came to the Internet later than many of you, during the heyday of web-based forums. There, I found deep and rich communities and made friendships that my non-virtual friends found puzzling. Today we see that same dichotomy of acceptance and rejection of 3D worlds as “real” or “unreal.” But the trend, I think, is towards assimilating a larger and larger percentage of the population with each technological breakthrough – whether 3D visualization (as in Second Life) or kinetic motion (as in the Nintendo Wii).

Traditionalists worry that this assimilation will destroy our civic life. Net utopians look forward to that destruction. But I think Yochai Benkler is right in finding the middle ground: virtual networks often extend rather than replace our physical ones. Eric Gordon calls this embrace “net-locality.” You do it every time you pick up your cell phone and ask “Where are you?”

I don’t think it’s coincidence that the computer game industry is pushing many of these advances. Games are about engagement, and it turns out that what engages human beings most is other people. Game developers are figuring out how to get people to form teams and achieve goals together. Corporate managers are taking notes.

And those of us who care about civic and political engagement better take notes, too. Robert Putnam worried about bowling alone. Anyone who’s seen World of Warcraft would stop worrying about whether the Internet can build social capital and instead wonder – how is it going to help us to spend it?

I see two future worlds. In one, we have the Matrix. Virtual worlds become the new opiate of the disempowered masses. We emigrate, as Ted Castronova puts it, and never look back. In the other, we have what Beth Noveck calls, “Democracy, the video game.” Our institutions of work and governance learn from the technology of play. In that vision of the future, virtual worlds allow us to enhance and make more meaningful our relationships to our employers, to our governments, and most of all, to each other.

Perhaps inspired by Umbridge, Harry Potter publisher Warner Bros is sic’ing its lawyers on booksellers who are throwing parties to sell the books. Among the terms of its contract with booksellers are that “No fees are charged for admission or any activities at the event . . . no third parties are associated with the event in any way . . . the event is small-scale, local, non commercial, not-for-profit.” One of the reasons cited for this policy was “to help us make certain that the HARRY POTTER trade mark and other protected materials are not misused.”

Independent booksellers are scaling back or scrapping their events, including many that were to raise money for charity. Events that would promote the sale of Warners’ book.

I don’t normally write about these issues, but the blatant overreach of Warner to mine every last penny out of its intellectual property represents yet another sad milestone in the takeover of participatory culture. The ASCAP faced public outrage when it tried to shake down the Girls Scouts of America from singing copyrighted campfire songs. In Order of the Phoenix, Harry and friends overthrow Umbridge. Who will overthrow the publishers?

Unfortunately, that also means that I will be leaving my position as Director of Online Education for the Center for Legal Aid Education, where I’ve been privileged to serve the legal aid community for four years. I’ve learned so much about elearning, distance education, skills training, and legal aid; and hope to use what I’ve learned to improve the learning experience of today’s law students.

Press Release: Berkman Center and CALI Partner to Create New Legal Education Resource

From one perspective, universities would be agreeing to help the RIAA and MPAA reap profits in exchange for something to which they already have every right — fair use of copyrighted works for educational purposes. Looked at this way, the publishing industry is holding education hostage and asking for file-swapping royalties as ransom.

From another perspective, both parties are simply asking for logistical help. Universities want a copyright/fair use “clearinghouse.” Publishers want help tracking down individuals who swap files illegally. The issue of abstract rights (right to fair use, right to profit from copyright) is secondary to the practical ability to enjoy those rights.

Either way you look at it, the two parties (broadly speaking) are engaged in a negotiation, and universities can do quite a bit to strengthen their hand. Perhaps the easiest and most important thing they could do is to establish a legal defense fund and begin pushing back the boundaries of fair use, which are shrinking because of general counsels’ risk aversion. An insurance policy would balance that risk aversion and put the initiative back into universities’ hands to define fair use by their own interests.