Who owns it?

In this digital age of bites and bytes enveloping our social status and personal presentation to the world at large with a simple Google search string, the question at the top of the list of many is: who owns it? It is defined by the personal content about our lives, as much as the content that we contribute online as part of our professional and academic persona's. Does it become open source unless we deem it not to be? If we collaborate with peers, which peer stamps it with their copyright or does the right to claim it as original work belong to the whole? Twenty-first century learning experiences and careers are ripe with examples of questions of ownership: Facebook privacy policies, tweets from Twitter, comments on blogs or newspaper articles, message board posts, wikis, and last but not least, ownership of online course content whether locked behind server authentication or published for the browser world to see.

Cathy Davidson and David Goldberg, in their book The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, discuss the collaborative and collective learning outside of the classroom and how it juxtaposes the majority of learning in the classroom which still resembles learning before the first personal computer existed. It is the minority of early adopters of new learning methodologies that include collaboration, online learning, and peer-to-peer instruction. Few students experience learning in the classroom as they do everyday outside the classroom with their laptop, smartphone, or iPad in hand. Davidson and Goldberg also make the point that invading the personal spaces of students that they have on Facebook is not the goal. Creating learning spaces online where students feel just a comfortable to share and learn in an academic realm of teaching and learning is the challenge (and struggle).

But again, who owns it? Does the student own the work and the right to it once it is posted behind the authentication of Blackboard? Do the privacy policies of the institution trump the policies of the course management system? Or does everyone own a piece of the pie? How does "growing up digital" change the way we look at privacy rights as the generation known as the Millennial's, and those that come after, grow up with the details of their lives online? Policies covering digital ownership exist for the RIA (Recording Industry of America) and they have pursued those legal battles openly, but in a world of voluntary peer-to-peer sharing and learning collaboration, policy outside of Creative Commons is assumed.

As part of EAD882 at the College of Education at Michigan State University, this blog will explore the idea of growing up digital, what it means to education from K-20, and the policy that shapes the digital age. I will also explore the idea that education must "Adapt or Decline" as stated by Anya Kamenetz in her March 2010 Inside Higher Ed opinion piece. Have policies such as NCLB pigeon-holed the K-12 system into teaching for the test and left no room for creativity, exploration or adaption to different learning styles? If change at traditional higher education institutions really happens "one death at a time", will change come too late as the proportion of non-traditional students grows to record populations and they flock to institutions that are willing to provide a non-traditional education? I will explore these questions over the next 16 weeks.