Multiple Voices (intro): Hello and welcome to OEG Voices. OEG Voices. OEG Voices. OEG Voices. A podcast bringing to you the voices and ideas of open educators from around the world. OEG voices is produced by Open Education Global. A member based non-profit organization. Supporting the development and use of open education globally. Learn more about us at oeglobal.org. There's much to take in at the global level. We hope to bring you closer to how open education is working. By hearing the stories of practitioners. Told in their own voices. Each episode introduces you to a global open educator And we invite you to later engage in conversation with them in our OEG Connect community. Alan Levine: Welcome to the OEG Voices podcast, and I'm your host from Open Education Global. I'm Alan Levine and so this is one of the episodes I'm really positive is going to be highly charged and I admit, as I told our guests, I have no format or agenda and so we just like to do this conversation style. So I'm really excited to be in conversation today with a longtime open education advocate and someone who always has a strong opinion but backed by experience research. And what I really love is math. So we want to talk about that. But now we also want to talk about who's sitting in a pretty ideal location. So I got to say chow to Jonathan Poritz. So welcome to the show. Where are you? Jonathan Poritz: Thank you. Alan Levine: And how did you get to where you're right where you're sitting right now? Jonathan Poritz: So I'm in a tiny, tiny little village called Capriglia, which is part of a town called Pietrasanta. Capriglia has two public organizations, the church and the pub. It's not really a pub, it's a sort of bar restaurant and it's up about a thousand feet vertically climb from the coast along. So I'm in sort of Northwestern Italy. I'm about a half an hour from Pisa of the famous leading tower, although I keep going to Pisa just to go to the Ikea. But I haven't been to the leaning tower yet this trip. And I came, my wife and I were both longtime academics in the United States. I think I taught or been a student at about a dozen universities or colleges around the United States, I think in all four times zones of the contiguous 48. And then also a couple of time zones in other parts of the world. I've been a student or teacher and my wife, was a long time faculty member professor of sociology at Colorado College, in Colorado in the USA where we used to live. And we both reached a point where we were able to just quit our jobs and move here. And she's finishing up a couple of academic books and was writing, she's written a few novels and she's writing some more novels and I wasn't yet ready to completely give up my open education movement work. So I'm working insane amount actually these days at the moment. I think officially I'm working for three different NGOs doing sort of gig work in the open movement and I continue to do that. I'm toying with the idea of trying to start my own nonprofit just because I have a bunch of ideas and they don't really fit perfectly with any of the NGO that I'm working with at the moment. I think if I had a nonprofit I could seek funding from, I don't know, Melinda Gates or George Soros or somebody and try and get some support to do some other projects. Anyway, so that's why I'm here. I ran away from the United States and have found a very happy place to land here in Italy. Alan Levine: How did you pick Italy and how's your Italian by the way? Jonathan Poritz: So I'm fluent in Italian. I'm actually a dual US Italian citizen. I had a previous marriage a long, long time ago to an Italian citizen, at which point I learned Italian and got Italian citizenship. So that's one of the reasons it means all the visa problems are not an issue. And it's interesting, my wife actually spent a year in this town when she was a college student a million years ago. And she had very good Italian at that point. Hers is not as fluent at the moment and we're both feeling like we are kind of missing a language. She's feeling like the language, she's a very verbal person and she's feels like she doesn't have the fluency in Italian. I'm feeling like talking to people in the open movement here in Europe, there's a whole set of ways of talking about things that are the standard starting points in the United States and in North America I would say. And that don't kind of have the same traction here. So I went to a meeting just a couple of weeks ago of the group called Open Education Italia, and it was, the Italian was fine, it was actually it really fast. They were talking really, really fast. But it was a lot of fun. But it was odd to me that many of the go-to rhetorical devices in the open movement that are just sort of standard in the United States and Canada, I don't know Mexico as well, but in the part of North America I know just kind of they're okay but they don't have the same traction here that they did in North America. Alan Levine: That's really interesting. And I know you're not ready to make any broad generalizations about the open education scene in Italy. Hope we can continue this conversation, but that was something that came out of our email and that we're certainly interested in to get out of the usual North American perspective. So you're going to be our ambassador. Jonathan Poritz: As Open Ed Global must have a lot of Open Education Global has a much bigger reach I assume. I've volunteered and worked with a lot of NGOs based in North America and the Open Education Network for example, I was on the steering committee for a little while of the Open Education Network and they're absolutely fantastic people. They have great connections all over the US and Canada starting to reach out to I think at least one if not more universities in Australia. But the US has a sort of global footprint, a big nasty muddy footprint you might say. But the rest of the world has a little different and I assume OE Global has interrelationships with so many different organizations around the world and situations around the world. You must have a lot of experience with this that I'm starting to. You should teach me how I should talk to people here. Alan Levine: Okay, here's the truth. Okay, so we are global but it's still a lot of North America and Europe is strong and there are memberships in Japan and Taiwan, kind of carry over from the open courseware movement things. There's a lot of places we don't have really good connections and then you can talk broadly but you know learn so much more when you get to know individual projects, which you probably knew from your open education work. So I think especially we can definitely become more globally global and that's what we have to do. And so that's why it's exciting to be able to have you transfer your experience and keep us posted on it. So I guess I want to dial back, I always like to ask what was the thing that first brought you into or made you aware of what we call, it probably wasn't even called open education. I'd imagine. What was your start? Did someone who was an early influence or what was an early influence on your thinking? Jonathan Poritz: Well I think I actually had an a somewhat different approach entry into the open education movement maybe than many folks because I'm very old, as I say, I'm more than 100,000 years old in base two. And I started as a young geek in a college town in New Jersey and I taught myself to program before Al Gore invented the internet. And I became aware of, I was aware that it was called the free software movement from early on, the kind of early writings of Richard Stallman. And Richard Stallman is a fellow who is a very complicated, I think he was a genius in many of the things. I'm unhappy with a lot of the stances he has taken on more and political and personal and humane topics. But anyway, as a thinker in the open free software movement, I think he was very influential on me. I worked in this college town, I programmed starting in middle school, I programmed for money in a lot of the research labs and in campus and I was the whole kind of thing he described, you read some of the early writings of Richard Stallman, he talks about how he got into this because he wrote to some printer company and said, "Send me your driver. I need to modify it." The printer driver. They said, "What are you talking about? Our intellectual property. I'm sure as hell not going to send it to you." And he kind of created the free software movement in response to that. I had very similar sorts of experiences. I worked with things which were, people weren't aware of the importance of the, or financial value in software. And so I became very quickly aware of the free software movement I guess these days I usually call it FLOSS, free libre open source software. I just think that it's hard to find a good term. I used to write that battle but I don't anymore. So then I worked on that for years. I worked in IT industry for a little while. I lived for five years in Switzerland in the early naughts. Actually I had a break in my academic career working at IBM research actually in Zurich, Switzerland. And it's interesting, all of the scientists in IBM research use Linux on their laptops and use free software basically all the time. And even in this big, one of the evil empires of the early commercial software age, from my early experience with IBM, but in the modern world, they're inside everyone used Linux. And so it was very natural to me to use free software. And when I became back to academia and started, I was teaching even more and teaching at an institution where the cost of living was tough for our students. I was teaching at Colorado State University of Pueblo for 17 years with really a lot of financially challenged students. And the idea of I teach calculus, I taught more calculus than the sections of calculus than there have been semesters I've been teaching. And calculus has been around for a long time. The first calculus textbook you could be claim to was written hundreds of years ago by a woman by the name of Maria Agnesi, actually an Italian woman wrote what sort of is one of the first textbooks about calculus. And what I teach is not all that different for what Agnesi wrote. Alan Levine: What's the license on that one? Jonathan Poritz: I'm sure it's in the public domain. Alan Levine: Yeah, it should be. That's great. Jonathan Poritz: I should translate the Agnesi introduction to calculus book into English. And so- Alan Levine: Another project. Jonathan Poritz: So it's just, if you're teaching a subject like that and if you're teaching a political science, maybe it changes every moment. But if you're teaching something like mathematics, undergraduate mathematics is by and large stuff that's been around for hundreds of years and why does there need to be a new calculus textbook every two or three years and I don't know, other than to make money. So it became very clear that was all the ills that we have in North America. Alan Levine: Also, sorry, the effort to make it more relevant. So what I loved, I had a beautiful calculus teacher in high school and what Mr. Witts did was bringing the practicality of calculus with suspension bridges and things from everyday life. Jonathan Poritz: Right, right. No, so I'm totally agree with that. And there's a lot of, I, there's a great OER author in Massachusetts who's writing a book on climate science who, I went to a presentation yesterday as part of open ed week, open access week and he was talking about how you have the world is changing. We have to, what used to be stale science or very static science that there are these different lithosphere and the atmosphere and the cryosphere and the biosphere, we used to be able to teach them as really static. It's changing very quickly and we need to make it relevant to our students. And I think that's very convincing. And if only, Alan, that were what the calculus textbooks are doing, that's not what they're doing. They're not adding more relevant things, they're just kind of changing the order of the problems at the end of the section. So you can't assign the same problems without buying a new book and making you pay those fees again. Alan Levine: One would argue OER allows that flexibility to create the relevant context, right? Jonathan Poritz: Absolutely. So for example, I wrote, let's see, I think the second OER I wrote that looks like a textbook. I've written some things which I think of as OER but are not really textbooks but was one on statistics. And it's just because I've been teaching out a pretty good book for many years. But I was teaching and it had a whole lot of stuff I didn't teach. It had a lot of a few things that I taught but I didn't like the way it was presented. And I was teaching in an election year, I was teaching the year that Donald Trump became our president and I was thinking I need to have examples of every little statistical technique because you see it on the front, you open the newspaper and the front paper, you look at the news, the front page of the newspaper has story results with a margin error or plus or minus 3%. And does that the students have this image of that means that it means definitely the actual number is definitely in that six percentage point where that's not what that means. And I thought it was really important to take stories from the headlines. I love teaching statistics during election a year because there's so much statistics in front of the students all the time. Alan Levine: And I'm just thinking back, one of the first brilliant teachers I worked with at Maricopa was a physics instructor, David Weaver. And he talked about the publisher content when he used it was certainly easy to integrate and he could just run with it. But when he talked about this change in his relationship with the content when he was having to pick and choose and do that amalgamation, I don't know if we really talk about what it does for us as teachers when we're basically creating the content, not just picking it off the shelf. Jonathan Poritz: I mean I think a lot of this, unfortunately the root cause of a lot of this is the economics that I could be in the United States, but in the sense of looking for a canned course you can just insert into your life because you're paid very poorly and maybe 75% of contract hours in the United States in higher education or with contingent faculty and they are paid terrible amounts. At Colorado State University, we had a fellow who needed a visa and we had employed him for the entire year to teach in the math department. And the INS said he doesn't have a yearly salary, we can't give him a worker's visa because that salary is not what a person can live on for a year. So we can't take a sponsored work visa for this fellow because we're not paying him enough. And so we had to figure out a way to pay him some summer courses or saying get that counted. And because of that, people are, they take on many more sections then they might otherwise teach and they're overworked and that causes lots of problems and wanting to just insert something in. But in my own education I went largely to R1 type universities and the faculty were arrogant. They should use someone else's way of describing this material. They were the boss. And so there's a certain kind of annoying arrogance that can drive people towards openness because they want to build their own resources to explain things the way they want to explain. I'm not going to accept Pearson's version of this concept. I will explain my way as long as that's done in a humane way, I think that's a good way to get into the openness. So there we go. Arrogance is one thing to people and also the desire to make things more up to date as you were mentioning I think is a really a good point. Alan Levine: That's why I like talking to you because of, I never thought about arrogance generated OER. But if it gets into the open, I wanted to talk about we've had lots of conversations over the years but I mean just recently why I said I really just want to have Jonathan on and talk about was this discussion going on in the CCC OER mailing list where someone was asking for that diagram that gets used a lot to explain the impact of the cost of textbooks, which is the chart graphing the cost of textbooks versus the computer price index. And there was a little bit of exchange and then Amy Hopper who I think started a conversation linked to your blog posts where you really turn the question completely inside out. And so- Jonathan Poritz: Yes. Alan Levine: ... I would love to, if you could give me the or give audience are you're thinking about that and also why you even bother to go through that kind of dive into something as simple as a diagram. Jonathan Poritz: Well I think there's that whole arrogance and obsessiveness I think which can have some good effects. I guess I felt like I've explained to people many times, my colleagues working that in the open movement on my campus and on many other campuses when I was working with the state to run higher education in Colorado, I went to lots of campuses and talked to people and there's a certain thing that just they wouldn't quite get, I would say "Textbooks are really expensive." And they would say, "Yeah sure, we all remember how well were students textbooks were expensive." And I would say that to someone who had as much gray hair as I do and I would think "You are not understanding that this is a different ..." When I was a student, I had a real friend, a roommate who was studying intellectual history. He would come back with this stack of books at the beginning of every semester and he spent an insane amount of money it would seem to me, and it was maybe $150 in all those books. And even with inflation from back when a million years ago when I was a student, that's not as much as students spend on a single textbook today. And so I was trying to figure out what's going on there. And I think I have a hypothesis, it's kind of a psychological hypothesis that people have an image, people's intuition is that things, usually things pretty much stay the same. Okay, we get a little more sophisticated, we think, "Well things are changing, there's a kind of trend," and what's the trend? Well it's in the case of economics, it's inflation. We all know things that 5 cents milk carton I had when I was a little kid in elementary school now cost 25 cents or something like that because there's something called inflation. We all know that that's something going on. So the thing that's important is that inflation is not causing the-- is not responsible for the entire increase in the cost of everything. So in North America it's basically three times the rate of inflation. Up until very recently that graph has a little bubble toward the end of the cost of textbooks. And I would argue that that's in response to the open education movement. So I wanted to explain that. So I had this sort idea, well if you look back, if I'm trying to convince someone, I'm thinking, trying to convince someone things were expensive, they say "Sure, of course." And they're expensive now because of inflation. They were already expensive when I was a student and now the number is bigger just because of ... and the number is not bigger just because ... They wanted to give them a kind of multiplicative factor. I want you to imagine if you, back when you were a student how many years ago. For me that was many years ago. And I want so track the difference in price, the difference in of inflation and the actual effect of increase of cost for textbook. I wonder there be kind of what I was calling it, the textbook pain multiplier, what it is you imagine for yourself backwards to time when you were a student, you take the pain you experienced buying textbooks and you imagine multiplying it by a certain factor because the increase of textbooks is more than just inflation. And that's how much more expensive things would've had to have been back in your day in order for you to have had experience the same amount of pain as today's student subject. So compensating for the non inflation price increase and trying to make it personal to people. So the number, I forget what the number is for me, but you can look on graph I made on my website and I was a student back in the 1980s and the number is like, it's an amazing factor. It's three or five time, I forget what it is, but the times the cost. So my roommate who bought $200 worth of intellectual history textbooks or monographs and things would've been spending 500 or $800 in at that time in order for him to have the same amount of pain as students today are feeling. And of course that's still an underestimate. We've only taken into account one thing which is the difference in the rate of increase of cost of textbooks compared to the rate of increase of the consumer price index, basic inflation. There are other things since I was a student, the United States has abandoned many of the social safety net things and public funding of higher education has gone way down. So all of the other things that were in the students' lives in those is are different. My parents helped me pay for college and maybe someone of a middle class family would be spending more money on healthcare today than they were when I was a young person. And so the families would be able to pay less to help their young people support get an education. So I was just trying to find a way to explain to people. I would say textbook expensive. They say, "Yeah sure, of course they're expensive." And I'd say, "Well they're more expensive now." And they'd say, "Yeah sure. That's inflation." I was like, "No, it's not just inflation. Let me show you this graph is quantifies exactly how much more than inflation it was." I think to math or data people that may have been a useful graph. I don't know. Alan Levine: Well I have to say I love that you provided the math at the end and gave a plug for understanding that high school algebra, that even solving the equation. I'm also thinking, I mean we had a leader at Maricopa when I there, who would talk about the hidden tuition cost of transportation, childcare, that weren't really considered when we looked at what students were dealing with. And that's just gotten worse as you suggest and that's where the pain is. Jonathan Poritz: Absolutely. I mean, and yes, there's the thing, I would sort of think of it as my nuclear option, rhetorical nuclear option. When I was talking to people on my campus, which is that I knew a lot of students on my former campus were chronically hungry and were under housed, or not many of them were homeless according to some official literature. But they were housing insecure and food insecure. And I would tell this story, I have a student I work with, he gave me permission to tell this story about how I saw him one day eating lunch and he was just wolfing it down. I said, "Hey man, what's it? Is it really good? Is that a new place?" He said, "Oh yeah, it's pretty good. But I haven't been able to afford to buy food for the last three days. This is the first meal I've had in three days." And that's his life. And if you think of someone who can only buy food every one to skip food for a day or a day and a half or something because of their finances and you think, "Well I'm going to assign them this calculus textbook which costs $350 but it's better than that damn free one Poritz keeps giving me," Really? Three think of how many meals that student is going to be able to afford if he doesn't have to pay for the textbook of this $350. And I would use that to my great chagrin. There were a couple of people who would not find that convincing and who would still say, "Well education is more important than being hungry a few more times." Alan Levine: And it kind of goes back to, I think what you suggested is, yeah, textbooks were expensive in my day I dealt with it. Jonathan Poritz: Right, right. But I didn't go hungry to pay for it. Alan Levine: Exactly, exactly. So speaking of your blog, tell us about what mathematikoi means as a name. Jonathan Poritz: Oh, I just was looking, people know the name Pythagoras. I used to do this thing when I would say, when I teach in class, "I would say send me an email and tell me a little bit your background in mathematics and tell me your favorite piece of mathematics," and students, like 90% of the students will say the Pythagorean theorem in low level math classes. I think the reason is it's the only thing that has a name that they know. So Pythagoras is really good, he's got a great PR in the history of intellectual history in the west. People know his name. If you look at the history of, Pythagoras was a weird fellow. He sort of ran a cult and he was on the run from ... He came from Samos, the island of Samos in Greece, but he ended up in southern Italy actually. And he ran a cult and he was like, he didn't like beans and he was a vegetarian but he didn't like beans and he claimed he could talk to ... anyway, his cult had two different groups. They were the mathematikoi and the akousmatikoi were the two groups within the Pythagorean cult and the mathematicoy were, so the original word mathematics is mathema in ancient Greek, means learning. It's about learning, which is not something I had known before. And the mathematicoy were those in the learners. So those were ones who wanted to learn. They were the outer circle of the two concentric circles of the cult. And they were just wanted to learn things. I like the idea of the learners I opposed to the inner circle. Those were people real fanatic. So the story is that Pythagoras is the one who say everything is number and the music of the spheres, and he famously, he discovered that different notes that we hear that are in simple numerical ratios sound good together. And he liked simple ratios. But he also knew that the square root two is not a simple ratio, it's not a ratio of two whole numbers, it's what we called an irrational number in mathematics. And the inner circle knew that, and the outer circle was not supposed to reveal that. And someone released that information to the general public and they tracked him down and killed him. Anyway, I like the idea of the mathematicoy, those who are interested and they want to learn. So that's the origin of the name that I used for my blog. Alan Levine: And they want to share it, right. Jonathan Poritz: And they want to share. Exactly. They don't want to keep secrets. Unlike the inner circle. They want to share things. Alan Levine: Yeah. Can you give us a little overview of the things that are on your current interest and focus in your multiple NGO work now? Jonathan Poritz: Sure. So there are two things I'm really interested in. I've, I've been working with a Creative Commons organization for quite a while and I really enjoy working with them and I think it's really fascinating. I'm one of the facilitators of the online Creative Commons certificate course, which I think is a really valuable course. I've really enjoy it. I love taking it myself. And this is something that people in lots of people know. But certainly if you're in education you need to know these things about what are the obstacles to sharing and what are these technical tools will help you share. So I work with a Creative Commons organization. So I'll tell, this is my idea for what I wanted to maybe start a nonprofit to do would be I feel like the people have a little fear of the detail, certainly the copyright law. And they know you can get in trouble and you can get sued and there are these tools but they're a little bit, you got to do your attribution and your licensing statement and if you use someone else's work and you adapt it and you remix two things or the license is compatible and so on, it suddenly occurred to me that there should be some tool that walks you through it. So in the United States where we have a crazy complicated tax code, there are these tax preparation software things you can use. We walk, they ask you questions. So you want to file So do you have wage income, wage and tip income? Do you have investment income? Do you have children? And it asks you a lot of questions and it helps you fill in this form and by giving you asking questions and prompting you to think about things and then explaining, you say, "Well yeah I have a child but he's no longer living at home." And then you click on something gives you an explanation of that little corner of tax law. What I want to do is write a tool that's like an automatic tax preparation software but for licensing I want people to go to it and will ask you, so you want to release something? What kind of the Creative Commons has a thing called a license chooser and ask you a few questions. Do you want to share this? Do you want people to be able to use it commercially? I want it to ask many, many more questions. Are you remixing things together? What are the licenses on those things? What license do you want to use? Are those things compatible? So that's a kind of tool I want. I want to make it easier for people to use Creative Commons. I think we got stuck with the copyright system. We are stuck with the copyright system we have. I don't see it changing in any significant way in my lifetime and I think it's disaster for sharing. And we have this great tool and some people are aware of this tool. I spent a couple hours on a Zoom call with a random Italian undergraduate student a few weeks ago just because I bumped into him on a Slack channel and he said," Can I ask you some questions about creative Creative Commons licensing?" And he was aware that you can't just copy things on the internet, that there's a legal obstacle there. He wanted to share, he wants things to be shareable. So I think there's a tool that thanks to Larry [inaudible 00:30:16] and other great wonderful smart people at Creative Commons, there are now these tools and getting knowledge about them out is something that I of a bit of a crusade of mine. So that's one thing I work on quite a bit. Alan Levine: That would be great. Yeah, I want to say, I'm going back because when I lived in the States I used Turbo Tax and it's like this is one of the greatest pieces of software. It almost makes doing your taxes fun because it's sensible and you understand and it coaches you. Jonathan Poritz: Right. Exactly. Alan Levine: So I'm all aboard for that. I don't know if you've come across, I saw one a couple months ago that helps you walk through questions when trying to reuse content from Wiki Media commons. And it did something pretty interesting because I go in there and sometimes the licenses, there's like five to choose from and there's variance and you have to deal with your country and public domain is not a universal thing. So sometimes the licensing in Wiki Media Commons is like, it's very abstract. Jonathan Poritz: It is. I'm a little scared to say this. It's true there are complications and I'm scared to say it because I want to encourage people to use these tools and to use these resources that have been put out there. But people should spend a little time to think, to get a little bit of thinking, a little bit of information about how to use them that for example, in the OER world, we make an OER and we slap a license on it. I like to use the attribution share alike license. And so I put that license on things. But maybe I've used things inside my work that have a different license and so someone is going to remix my work. They have to be conscious of, well maybe I'd used something for fair because of fair use in the United States and fair use does not exist everywhere around the world. And so you know can imagine for example, I've been told there's a thing in Japanese copyright law that basically schools are a copyright free zone. Teachers can do whatever the hell they want. And there's an exception in Japanese copyright law. And so if you are an author of OER in Japan, you must think, oh hey I'll do whatever I want because I'm teaching. And then if I in America try to adapt that, boy, there may be lots of little landmines in the work I'm trying to do. So I think there are issues, I don't want to scare people away. So more education, this is my life. My entire adult life has been about taking things that people are scared of like math or computer science or legalities of copyright and Creative Commons licensing and try to make them, yeah okay they're scary but let's get past our initial fear because these are useful tools like that. So anyway, the other interesting thing I've been doing, I've been working, you mentioned Amy Hopper, I've been doing a little bit of gig work with the open Oregon folks lately just kind of helping them leave a bunch of resources from Google Docs into Pressbooks. And it turns out to be surprising company if you want to do it carefully and you want to make sure that all the accessibility is done in the proper way. And I feel like I've had a very ... My next blog post is going to be about, It seems like I've been lucky enough to be involved with all sorts of different kinds of authors and support structures for the creation of OER and there are so many different approaches and kind of target platforms people want to put their work on and workflows they've imagined. And it's really quite interesting. And what is a easy thing upfront for an author to use may then make it for a harder experience for the students or less flexible experiences with students. And there are a lot of wonderful work being done with great platforms. Pressbooks is a great platform but it's really interesting to see how these things play against each other. The different people have different, And the work we're doing in Oregon is the authors are doing so much work, they're creating this great material to share with their students. We don't want to add impositions to them. At the same time someone's got to write all texts for all those images and I'm not a disciplinary expert. So yeah, disciplinary expert, I'd better write those and all texts. So those are the kinds of things that I've been working on. Alan Levine: Well that's great. And I also, just this morning from the discussion I loved, I mean there's a question about fair use on pop culture content and there was some good responses about it's not a protection and, but I mean you made this great statement about we should not just shy away from it that we should practice it to ... Like you called it. It's a muscle that we don't exercise with if we don't use it on a basis. Jonathan Poritz: Yeah. So I think I got that from Meredith Jacob maybe or maybe Will Cross. There's that wonderful resource that they created with some other Peter Yazi and other authors, The Best Practices For The Fair Use In Open Educational Resources. And I've been to went to a couple of presentations about that and I think they talk about how it's only a defense, fair use, it's not a positive, it's a way you can defend yourself. But come on, use it or lose it. Because if we don't keep using it, we'll lose practice and courts will be shyer about letting people get away with it and we should keep using it. So I think that's ... And people tend to be very risk averse and you can understand can that because there have been some cases of people, there's the famous Houston Independent School Districts, got a $9 million settlement for some copyright infringement that a teacher was doing. And so we have to be concerned about these things but we also need to be a little more, for example I don't know much about trademark law. That's not the main subject that we learn about in the Creative Commons course, which I taught, took and now teach. But we mentioned in passing and what I have learned seems like, I remember when I was a young person, I would've thought, "Oh, you can't ever put a Coke can in a movie you're making because that's the trademark and they control every use of their trademark." That's not what trademark law says. Trademark law says you can't confuse consumers. So you can't have someone open a can of Coke, drink it and die and say, "Oh Coke is toxic." Because then people be confused that Coke is toxic. But you can have trademarks and you know can have pictures in your OER with trademarked items in them. And that's perfectly fine. So we tend to be very risk averse and I think if we knew a little more we could take more, we could make some things that are more relevant and lively for our students. Alan Levine: And I don't know if it's been a while since I looked at a lot of the great fair use resources. Like you, I think we should assert it. And I do it sometimes it's like I'm trying to do a remix or a satire and I really want to base it upon this thing that people know about. And so I try to state like this should be easily not confused with Ripley's Believe It Or Not, I got once a take down notice from Ripley's because I did a total mock of that and actually that was probably copyright. But I also got once tagged, because I have this collection of sharing stories I called Amazing Stories and I got this letter from the people who own, and he was saying they own that phrase almost as a trademark. But I think we should find ways to help people learn how to say, "Look, I did my diligence here and this is why I'm going to claim this is usable under fair use," and learn to justify it in a way that's visible. I don't see too many of those. Jonathan Poritz: I totally agree with you. I think being a little more, for example, so you just mentioned your Ripley's like as a parody. Parody is a really strong, fair use defense. I mean if you think about it, when I was a kid, when I was a young person, I was really into the Lord of the Rings Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. And the Harvard Lampoon published this book called Board of the Rings. An entire book makes crazy fun of the Lord of the Rings and instead of the Elf Legolas there's Legolamb and it's a lot of great fun parody. And you'd think Tolkien would've in his estate would've gone after them, but no. Parody is a great defense. So if you can, and also criticism, although you thinking about the word global in this context, fair use is a construction that exists in the United States. The fair dealing apparently at Meredith Jacob and Will Cross, and in that book say fair dealing is actually quite similar in many ways, in many important ways. But there's a lot of the world that is not under, in the British Commonwealth or in the United States. And one of the things that I as an author find or someone who shares is to think, I want my stuff to be usable on Mars, damn it. I want it to usable as widely as possible. And so I don't know what Martian copyright law is like, but maybe don't have fair use. And so that just goes to your point. Your point is that we should, when you use fair use, put a little footnote that says I'm using this by fair use and here's like, here's just the three word, one sentence description of why I think fair use applies in the situation. And then that someone can, in their own legal system, maybe there's an exception that covers that kind of use. So I totally agree with you. Alan Levine: I also want to talk about, because we've also crossed paths on this, let's talk about artificial intelligence and because I know you've been at this for a while and obviously it's of supreme, you hear about it nonstop. Jonathan Poritz: Yes. Alan Levine: And we know it's a lot of hype, but there are some interesting things happening in terms of what AI can do now that I think are going to get uncomfortable. Jonathan Poritz: I mean sure, I'm sure you've been following all of these discussions that's happening lately about, now there are these text generators, you can feed them a prompt and they generate text that looks pretty good. And so how do you teach first year writing at a higher education institution if the students can just feed the prompt into one of these text generators that will generate new texts, which they can. It's not plagiarism, it's not copied from some other source. My training is a mathematician. Mathematicians love to say, well this new thing is, if I think about it in this complicated way and I do this little bit of extra calculation, it's based on an earlier thing that I understood really well. So mathematicians, that's a problem we've already solved. And I think this is the situation with artificial intelligence is a problem we didn't solve. But it's the same problem we dealt with before, which is technology comes along and it seems magical at first. And when the germ theory of disease and computers in general and the internet and I don't know, there's so many technological revolutions that have happened. And we have, as a society, as a legal system, we have to confront them. We have to figure out how they impact our lives. And I feel like what bothers me about the discussion about artificial intelligence is not, I'm not saying that there's not marvelous new technology, but it's not artificial. It's not intelligent. It pushes everyone's buttons. They think, "Oh my god, the robots are going to take over the world or something." It's it everyone simply use, I was pushing this for a while with a group working group within the Creative Comments organization, let's just abolish the use of the phrase artificial intelligence and just call it large statistical model. I mean people don't like that. I like that phrase, but call it, have a call it tool, right? So I have a new tool that allows me to generate a lot of text, whether that tool is on a computer and is some sophisticated statistics or these things called neural networks or whatever, what some fancy new technique, or that tool is throwing a bunch of old books into a blender and picking bits of paper. I have a tool that generates new text when there are tools that are new text that humans have to drive, then the humans or the intelligence and the humans have agency and not the machine. I think I made some comment about on one of these forum about how giving credit to, I think that was you giving credit to an AI, is giving Ansel Adams giving credit to his camera for the copyright for his photography, or Norman Rockwell giving credit to his brush. It's a tool and it's a pretty impressive tool. And it, imagine there was a painting behind me, done by the Renaissance painter Raphael, a copy obviously. And if you show Raphael of my cell that can take a picture, a high resolution color picture of a bunch of kids sitting and he spent hours making this amazing painting behind it, he would've, "Oh my god, that's like, how should anyone get any credit for having to snap the press that button to take that picture?" And we as a society have decided that intellectual property exists even in photographs. And maybe that was a good decision, maybe it wasn't. But that's a solved problem. And AI so far doesn't do, and what bothers me is when the hucksters say that it does more, that it has agency, it doesn't have agency, that there was something different. There was a thing that was sponsored in part by IBM I think maybe it was Phillips and that the Vice Museum in Amsterdam that's big in opening their art collection and they collaborated with some tech company to make a new Rembrandt using artificial, using artificial, I'm using air quotes here, using artificial intelligence. And what they really was, they made a big statistical model of lots of features of Rembrandt paintings. And they had some humans say, "Well let's use the model for feet over here and the model for hands over here and model for faces every here. Let's glue them together and boy they're not connecting smoothly. So I better run on smoothing program." And there was no agency. It was all a big complicated tool. And so I think that a lot of the discussions and what bothers me is that the PR you saw about this effort, that there's a whole new kind of art. That this is an AI produced art and it's just a bunch of humans sitting in a room with a lot of computers clicking and typing instructions. And I don't know, for a long time I thought maybe people were making policy decisions, maybe didn't realize that this is just a fancy statistical model. It's just like every other computer program that seemed revolutionary was first invented and we dealt with it as a society. I think sometimes we have people with bad intent who do understand that not it has no agency. And nevertheless they say, "It's much closer to having agency than anything else we've done." No, it isn't. And I'm worried about conversations where people take the face value of tech PR. Another area here that's very similar is cryptocurrencies and blockchains. I mean think it's all, this is an area I worked on as a cryptographer myself when I worked for IBM, and it does not do what they say it does. And we have either the people who are selling it don't realize what it does and what it doesn't do or the people who are or they realize and they're lying. And I don't know which, when I talk to someone. Anyway, sorry, to rant at you. Alan Levine: No, no, this is what I wanted. But the thing is, when they try to explain it gets very fuzzy. And you suggested when you dig down, and I've tried to wade through some of the academic papers on it, it's not a thing to really understand what it's doing. Jonathan Poritz: But Alan, an academic paper is not intended for a general audience, not a nondisciplinary audience. You make a really good point. I think that we, as a lifetime educator, I always feel that we fail and when I see something going wrong, I think, "Well we didn't do a good job, a good enough job of educating people." We fail as educators when the only way to understand something is that no one has made an effort to explain the relevant complications in a way that can get ... I mean you don't have to understand I'm not a biologist and I'm not a virologist and I don't need to understand the details of how the SARS COV 2 virus works to know what the issues are about this pandemic going on now. And there need to be works, there need to be works of really good journalism and really good education that explain to the public what are the key features of this or that new technology and how will it affect people's lives. And I think that we've done a really bad, in those two areas in artificial intelligence and in blockchains, have done a really bad job of having enough knowledge so people can make smart decisions without getting buried in the details. The details don't matter, but some structural things matter. And we have done, I as someone worked in computer science, I am one of the ones who has failed at explaining this well enough to be useful to the general public. Alan Levine: We need some of those, the old, I forget who did the common craft videos that are, they explain things in plain English. Jonathan Poritz: Right. Right, right, right. Alan Levine: That might help. Jonathan Poritz: I've tried to do that. I think, I assert that, for example, with blockchains, I assert that if you give me an hour of your time, I can explain blockchains well enough that you will know everything you need to know to make smart decisions about NFTs and blockchain, crypto currencies and everything. But it's the people always then their eyes glaze, "No, I don't want to give you an hour, you're going to talk about math and computer science for an hour. That sounds terrifying. It's like going to the dentist, why would I do that?" But if people would give me an hour, I could explain that. Alan Levine: And really my interest with the image is because I see educators, students, they want to use these, they're going to try these out and it's moving so quickly. So that example, I didn't even realize that that Delhi was now creating a link for something you produced because it didn't do that in the beta, and that it put that attribution on there. Which I agree is, I don't want to credit the AI, but my question is how much credit do I really get? Because I didn't really do much. I typed words in a box. And do I have a lot of- Jonathan Poritz: That's the same thing when you stand in front of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor and you point your Canon camera up at the statue, when you click the button, how much did you really do? You stood in the same place a hundred thousand other tourists have stood and you will doubtless have a [inaudible 00:49:59] with that image. So you have enough agency that the tool is considered. Maybe that's the wrong decision. I don't know. Maybe there should be some, I mean the standard seems to be in US copyright law is about originality. It's not about the amount of work, right. So you can do an enormous amount of work and get no copyright by just collecting a lot of facts. Alan Levine: I'm less interested in copyright and just like, how do I use this stuff? So there was this great, I had to dig around for it. I was thinking of it. Andy Bio had this thing, he was an artist and he did this cover of Miles Davis's, some kind of blue in kind of mid style music. So it was nothing like it. And he did a cover that was a Photoshop degeneration cartoonized version of it. And he got sued. And so he's got this great post where he says, "How far from the original do I have to stray to make it something that that's not a copyright?" And it's gray as heck in the middle and it still is. Jonathan Poritz: Right? Well, isn't the whole, as in the United States, at least the fair use defense, if he could somehow claim that it was a parody of Miles Davis, then he would have a pretty strong fair use. I don't know. I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a lawyer. Yeah, look at Board of the Rings at Lord of the Rings. Yeah, it if boy was a bit, On the other hand, I'm told that if you write something that looks like Harry Potter fan fiction, JK Rowling will come down on you like a ton of bricks. Alan Levine: Don't mess with her. Jonathan Poritz: Yeah. Alan Levine: We don't want that. Jonathan Poritz: Yeah. At the end of the day, I think as an educator, I don't know the answer to that question that I think it's a really interesting question and much smarter people than I and more creative people and people with their eyes on the philosophy of the law should answer those questions about how much creativity, and you mentioning typing in a phrase and then an image appears, is that worthy of ... But I'm interested in the consequences for education. The idea that, I don't think people have talked about it, someone submitting artistic images as schoolwork. But what about these text generating AI statistical models, the submitting those as your paper. And my answer to that is, doesn't that drive us to change the kind of education we do? We should write and probably in a good direction. I mean, I'm not a writing instructor, I don't know how this would play out in writing, but the similar in mathematics education, we have a lot because of the economics of, and contingent labor and so on, a lot of people use these on automatic online homework systems. That's considered a problem in the OER movement because there aren't as many free ones as we would like. But that produces a kind of education which is focused on just following, turning our students into little machines that calculate answers that can solve certain kinds of equations and so on. And I don't ever want to teach that way. I don't think that's interesting. And my contention is that there are these tools that already exist. Do you know about the school called Wolfram Alpha? There's a thing called Wolfram Alpha, which is a kind of interface to the Wolfram Research Incorporated mathematic program, can solve equation, the make graphs, and do calculus and do statistics. And if there's a problem that can be solved by just typing into Wolfram Alpha, I don't want to teach my students how to solve that problem. I want to teach them go to Wolfram Alpha. And I think much of the undergraduate curriculum at a lot of places, my foreign institution is basically doing Wolfram Alpha. So let's not teach them that anymore. Let's teach them how to interpret statistics or what is calculus good for? Why does this matter? What kind of questions should they be asking Wolfram Alpha or whatever tool they're using to understand things about the world. And so if the tools become better at taking the annoying part out of mathematics, I'm happy about the way that's pushing me as a math instructor. If they're taking the annoying part out of teaching writing, maybe that's a good thing. Maybe writing will be better. Writing instruction will be better. Alan Levine: I don't know, we go back to writing in Blue Books or something like that. Jonathan Poritz: If you want to prevent people from using those tools, I don't know. No. Toward the end of my teaching experience, I was teaching with open book and open note and open internet during the tests. Because what would I do? I'm a professional. If I wanted to solve a new problem in number theory, I would look up the go to Wikipedia articles and "Oh, how exactly does that the go?" I would look it up. So why I'm a professional and I want to use that tool. Why wouldn't I let my learners use the same tools? Alan Levine: Excellent. See, I know this would ... Well I'm having fun here. I hope this is good and I want to continue to, and I hope we can foster more of these conversations at OE Global. Jonathan Poritz: Yes. Alan Levine: I'm wondering, I'm starting to do something with my podcast. Can you suggest maybe three people we should have a conversation with like we're having here? Who are some really interesting people in the field right now? Jonathan Poritz: Well, I'm just listening to an audio book. This is a hard person to get, but do you know the writer Cory Doctorow? Alan Levine: Yeah. Yeah. Jonathan Poritz: He's just written a book, a nonfiction book together with an economist named Rebecca Giblin, I think is her name. And it's called Chokepoint Capitalism. And a lot of it is about the funding mechanisms of artistic creation and related to scholarly. There's a lot of discussion of copyright law and platform technology. I'm listening to an audiobook and he keeps using the phrase ad tech. And of course I hear it as ed tech. So every time it's not ed, it's not ed tech. It's ad tech. But anyway, he's has some really amazing, I think he's a hard person to get, but he, he's actually spoken to podcasts, that he might be interested. If you want to talk to people, Neil Butcher is a open education person in South Africa. He's has a really interesting insights into a lot of things. He's a fascinating guy I've been lucky to be on some working groups with him in the Creative Partners organization. Paola Corti is a great person. You must know Paola. She's my contact point in the Italian open education community. There are some really cool people in, I'm trying to learn the European open education movement. Like Alec Tarkowski is a big guy. Yeah, there's some really interesting people that happen across Europe. They're interesting people. I don't know, have you had an opportunity to interview some of the people like Catherine Cronin, is a huge one? Alan Levine: Yeah, I know KatheCatherinerine very well, and I would love to talk to her. And she's kind of moved into a different phase of work, but she's- Jonathan Poritz: Oh, has she? I didn't know. Alan Levine: Yeah. More like community work, but yeah. Yeah, that's a great suggestion. I'll reach out to her. I actually did a project, there's a photographer colleague, Jonathan Worth, who took some portrait to Corey Doctorel and we did a project where Cory Doctorow allowed our students to do remixes of them. And Cory's writings and his prolific strong stands publicly about the ideas about openness are really valuable. So yeah, I will take a long shot and see. I would love to have a conversation with him. Jonathan Poritz: Yeah. He appears in some of the oddest places. He was interviewed on some cryptocurrency podcast a couple years ago. I happened to hear him responding, so maybe he'll say yes. Alan Levine: All right. So I want to thank you, Jonathan, for having this conversation, and thank you- Jonathan Poritz: Sure. Alan Levine: ... people listening to this episode. This is our Open Education Global podcast. And I'm going to add on the end, I kind of try to find a relative soundtrack from the free music archive. And I found a music track called Imagery Intelligence by Nul Tiel Records, Licensed Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike. And so we like to use special music on each site. You'll find this episode at the voices.oeglobal.org. And if you want to, we try to do some follow up conversation with Jonathan and our OEG community, where you've been very prolific, and I appreciate that. And again, I appreciate you sharing some suggestions and anybody else listening, I'd love to hear your ideas about people we should talk to. So I want to say chow to Jonathan and lets you say goodbye. And then I have one more ask. Jonathan Poritz: Okay. Ciao. Alan Levine: That's great.