Syllabus & Resources

Building Your Own eBooks for Primary or Supplementary Materials

e-books EPUB

Advance Preparations

What devices to bring – We will be in a room with Mac computers. You may want to bring your laptop if you are more comfortable with it. You may also want to bring your iPad if you have one so you can try out the many eBook readers. If you decide to use iBooks Author to create your eBook, you will need a Mac running the Lion operating system. We will have them in the classroom if you do not have the appropriate equipment. The other tools are web-based so your computer platform will not matter.

Software to install –

iTunes (if you don’t already have it): http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/

Mac App Store

Mac App Store (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

iBooks Author (if you have the appropriate Mac): Available free from the App Store.

Calibre: free download from http://calibre-ebook.com/download

Image representing Dropbox as depicted in Crun...

Dropbox: http://www.dropbox.com

Create Accounts –

iTunes

ISSUU: http://issuu.com/

Copyright Clearance Center: http://www.copyright.com/

Dropbox

Materials to Bring – Since the goal of the workshop is to create all or a significant portion of an eBook, you should bring any materials you will need either in digital or paper form. Part of our workshop will be to try the OCR software in our Copy Center that scans book chapters and converts them to Word documents. All of our copiers will scan pages to PDF format. We will be discussing curating resources, which means cataloging materials in the appropriate formats for use in your eBook. If your materials are on a school server, be sure you have a way to access those materials from off campus. Moving them to Dropbox is one way to solve the problem.

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Monday AM: The Future of Books in Teaching and Learning

  • Introductions and Goals of the Workshop
    • To understand the power of eBooks
    • To understand options for the use and creation of eBooks
    • To develop a strategy for collection and curation of digital materials
    • To learn how to use some eBook authoring tools
    • To better apply copyright and intellectual property guidelines
  • What is a book these days?
  • eBook Primer – eBooks are available
    • Publishers
    • Formats
    • Readers
    • Pricing
  • Why create my own primary text or supplementary materials?

Monday PM: Creating eBooks – Digital Curation and Design (bring some of your materials)

  • Digital Curation
    • What is  digital curation?
      • Strategies for collecting materials
        • central repository
      • Key criteria
        • formats
        • ease of conversion
        • tagging / categorizing
        • finding materials
    • Digital Curation Tools for eBook creation
    • Finding sources
      • Textbooks
      • Other non-fiction in your discipline
      • Primary source materials
      • Maps
        • Static
        • Annotated
        • Animated
      • Images / Slideshows
      • Animations
      • Models / Simulations
      • Video
      • Public course materials
  • Design issues and required formats
    • Design
      • What is the purpose of the eBook?
        • primary text
        • secondary resource
        • digital course-pack
        • learning management (Blackboard, etc.) replacement
      • What keeps students engaged?
        • color
        • mixed media pages
        • interactive materials
        • social networks?
      • Content-intensive courses require content anchors.
      • Fixed or variable content – timeframe?
      • Size of eBook
        • entire year
        • entire term
        • smaller segments – units
    • Format of materials
      • Use of Calibre to change eBook formats
      • Video
      • Slideshows
      • Images
        • upload or link to web source?
      • Maps
      • Documents
        • PDF universal format
        • embed with ISSUU
      • Text
        • conversion issues
        • Word or Pages to HTML issues

Tuesday AM: Learning the Authoring Tools

Tuesday PM: What Materials May I Use? Fair Use, and Intellectual Property

Presentation: Copyright Clarity: Using Copyrighted Materials for Digital Learning
Video: Larry Lessig: Free Culture
Vodpod videos no longer available.
  • Key Resource – Copyright Clarity: How Fair Use Supports Digital Learning, Renee Hobbs
    • p. ix: “The doctrine of fair use is central to the enterprise of education — and this book shows why educational leaders and classroom teachers must join scholars, librarians, and others to understand their responsibilities and to advocate for their rights under copyright law.”
    • Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education 
  • All materials provided specifically as workshop notes by Renee Hobbs – Media Education Lab unless specified otherwise, under the Fair Use guidelines of the Copyright Act of 1976 . All materials used for noncommercial educational purposes.
  • The spirit of the law
    • p. x: “… citizens themselves must interpret and apply the doctrine of fair use according to the specifics of each context and situation.”
  • Introduction to Copyright Matters for Digital Learning
    • The explosion of new communications technologies makes it easy for people to share, use, copy, modify, distribute, and excerpt or quote from preexisting sources. But owners are forcefully asserting their own rights to restrict, limit, charge high fees, discourage use, and they sometimes use scare tactics.
    • Educational use guidelines contribute to increased, not decreased, copyright confusion among educators.
      • Charts and graphs that claim you can use 10% of this or 1,000 words of that — educational use guidelines — are not the law.They are the result of negotiated agreements between lawyers representing publishing companies and educational groups.
  • Understanding Copyright and Fair Use
    • Carrie Russell, Complete Copyright – Office for Information Technology, American Library Association
      • The Copyright Law of 1976 includes Section 107, the doctrine of fair use.
      • It not only allows, but encourages socially beneficial uses of copyrighted works such as teaching, learning, and scholarship. Without fair use, those beneficial uses — quoting from copyrighted works, providing multiple copies to students in class, creating new knowledge based on previously published knowledge — would be infringements. Fair use is the means for assuring a robust and vigorous exchange of copyrighted information (27).
      • Code of Best Practices (see resource link above)
        • Educators can:
          • make copies of newspaper articles, TV shows, and other copyrighted works and use them and keep them for educational use.
          • create curriculum materials and scholarship with copyrighted materials embedded.
          • share, sell, and distribute curriculum materials with copyrighted materials embedded.
        • Students can:
          • use copyrighted works in creating new materials
          • distribute their works digitally if they meet the transformativeness standard
      • Note that each of these principles comes with a description, rationale, and limitations. That’s because users need to make fair use determinations based on the unique features of the specific context and situation.
      • Transformativeness occurs when people add value or repurpose copyrighted material to create something new.
        • Landmark case: Bill Graham Archives v. Doris Kindersley Ltd.
          • Hobbs, p. 47 & 48:
            • The second Circuit Court judge wrote: In such a case as this, a copyright holder cannot prevent others from entering fair use markets merely “by developing or licensing a market for parody, news reporting, educational or other transformative uses of its creative work.” Moreover, a publisher’s willingness to pay license fees for reproduction of images does not establish that the publisher may not, in the alternative, make fair use of those images.
            • Translation: Just because the New York Times has a system in place for charging educators for the use of newspaper articles doesn’t mean that you can’t use newspaper articles freely for educational purposes under the doctrine of fair use.
            • Transformativeness in K-12 Education
              • Did the unlicensed use “transform” or repurpose the material taken from the copyrighted work by using it for a different purpose than that of the original, or did it just repeat the work for the same intent and value as the original?
              • Was the material taken appropriate in kind and amount. considering the nature of the copyrighted work and of the use?
              • If the answer to these two questions are yes, a court is likely to find a use fair. Such uses of copyrighted material are not likely to be challenged by copyright owners.
      • Music video: Users’ Rights, Section 107
  • Making a Determination of Fair Use
    • No rules or guidelines can simplify the decision-making process because a fair-use determination rests on the specific context and situation of the use. Rather than defer to lawyers who may not have a full understanding of the educational goals, context, and situation, it is important for educators themselves to make fair use determinations.
    • The “reasonableness standard” increases educators’ confidence in making a determination of fair use. The copyright law includes a special provision that can eliminate statutory damages for librarians and educators who “reasonably believed and had reasonable grounds for believing” that his or her use was a fair use.
    • Section 107: The fair use of a copyrighted work is not an infringement of copyright. This includes reproduction in copies for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use, the factors to be considered shall include:
      • the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
      • the nature of the copyrighted work;
      • the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
      • the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
  • Other important concepts and legislation
    • Creative Commons (CC)
      • … is an alternative licensing scheme, founded by Professor Lawrence Lessig, now at Harvard University Law School, which aims  to make it easy for people to build upon other people’s work. The licenses allow creators to enable how others can make use of their work. Many individuals and nonprofit organizations have made their work available under these new licenses to encourage sharing. People can also make fair use of materials created under a Creative Commons license.
    • Digital Rights Management (DRM)
      • DRM is anti piracy technology used by some copyright owners to control who gets to access and copy their work. Software companies, movie, and music companies use DRM to contra how people install, listen to, view, and duplicate digital files. In whatever form it takes, DRM is, in essence, a digital padlock, protecting intellectual property from unauthorized copying.
    • Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA), Section 1201
      • The DMCA makes it illegal to produce technology devices or services that circumvent access to copyrighted works. It also criminalizes the act of circumventing content, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself.
      • Handbrake, software that “rips” DVDs is not able to descramble the Content Scrambling System (CSS) embedded on many DVDs. Therefore, it does not circumvent access and violate the DMCA. Fair use guidelines are still in force.
    • 2002 TEACH Act, Section 110
      • Section 110 (1) offers educators a special exemption for displaying or using copyrighted materials for face-to-face learning, while Section 110 (2) enables educators to share materials on digital networks for distance learning. These exemptions should not be confused with the fair use provision, which offers an independent basis for exemption from copyright infringement liability.
  • If you found this material useful and want to learn more, please purchase:

Wednesday AM & PM: Create Your eBook

Thursday AM & PM: Create Your eBook

Friday AM: Share Your eBook

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