Wisconsin Union Blend

I do a lot of dishes. And for whatever reason, I’m always looking for something to do while I’m doing dishes.

My latest strategy for bringing together soap suds and self-improvement is watching the stellar series of TED videos. TED, or Technology, Entertainment, and Design, is annual conference where leaders and thinkers share their innovative ideas in short, 18 minute talks.

I’ve been happy to find that many of these talks are about education, new approaches to presenting and communicating complex information, or about emerging technologies of interest to educators and instructional technologists.

I’m just getting started on the TED talks (there are currently over 200 talks on the site and available through iTunes), but I thought I’d share a few of the talks I found most relevant to my work as an instructional technologist:

• Johnny Lee shows us a smart board, and a couple other neat things, that he built from a $40 Wii Remote. That’s cool as it is, but what I found most impressive about his talk was his enthusiastic approach to sharing his research. He says, “To me what is most interesting about either of these two projects is how people found out about them … I’m just a researcher in my lab with a video camera, and within the first week a million people had seen this work … literally within days engineers, teachers, and students from around the world were already posting their own YouTube videos of them using this system or derivatives of this work.” Now that’s the Wisconsin Idea!
• Sir Ken Robins argues, convincingly, that common approaches to early education stifle creativity
• Amy Smith talks about several “basic tools with world-changing results“
• Hans Rosling shares an impressive approach to presenting statistics, and calls for making statistical data more readily available to the public.

Now if I could only finish the dishes in a single 18 minute talk!

Got a favorite TED talk? Or better yet, a favorite way to keep your mind busy while doing the dishes? Let us know in the comments!

Okay here’s the question: Let’s say I create a presentation, a podcast, or a video as part of my work here at the University. I think I did a good job on it and I want to share it with the world. I slap a Creative Commons license on it and say, “Here it is. Enjoy.” The thing is, was it ever my right to put a CC license on it in the first place? If I created it as part of my work, did I have the right to share it with the world?

Now let’s move to phase two.

Let’s say I use a University service, a website on a UW server, to share it with the world.  As part of using this service, the Terms of Use states that the University  retains copyright control of that presentation, podcast or video. So what does that mean? Does the University retain the CC license I placed on the work or is that license nullified? Is the University obligated to share the work under the terms of the license?

What do the three people actually reading this blog think?