Author: ksuchor

The CCCC-IP Begins Its Third Decade: Join Us in Tampa at the 4Cs

We warmly invite all CCCC conference attendees to two events sponsored by the Caucus on Intellectual Property and Composition/Communication Studies (CCCC-IP). This is a landmark year for the IP Caucus, which is beginning its third decade and has now been recognized as a standing group. For twenty years the caucus has explored IP issues pertinent to our academic field and beyond, including the following:

• plagiarism and authorship
• student and teacher rights related to intellectual property
• copyright and copyleft as they relate to scholarship and teaching
• best practices in teaching students and instructors about intellectual property issues
• open access and open-source policies
• contemporary issues in intellectual property, such as corporate surveillance and collection of user metadata (as related to scholarship in composition and communication)

The first event will be the annual open meeting of the caucus. During this session, we welcome educators with questions and concerns about intellectual property to join us in discussions of how intellectual property affects the work of scholars, teachers, and students in our field.

This year’s interactive, action-focused meeting includes a breakout session into four roundtable groups. Each roundtable group, led by a facilitator, will discuss a particular set of IP issues in order to elicit practical solutions, action plans, lobbying strategies, and the production of documents for political, professional, and pedagogical use within CCCC and beyond. Near the end of the meeting, the roundtables reconvene to share their discussions, plans, and recommendations for future action.

The session will also feature remarks by Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), advocate for the passage of the Federal Research Public Access Act, and organizer of Access2Research.

This year’s roundtables:

1. Legal and Legislative Developments

This roundtable hosts a discussion of the previous year’s legal and legislative IP developments as they affect students and educators. In previous years our colleagues at this table have discussed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which under some circumstances can have an adverse impact on what students and faculty are able to accomplish in the classroom as well as additional legislation that affect copyright and intellectual property. Discussions have also touched on court cases being closely watched by the educational community, such as one involving Georgia State University’s system of electronic reserves. No matter what the specific topics, discussion will revolve around finding ways to safeguard the ability of students and teachers to make appropriate use of copyrighted material in furtherance of legitimate educational goals.

Roundtable 2: IP Advocacy and Outreach within and beyond CCCC/NCTE

With both short- and long-term planning in mind, this roundtable considers how the CCCC-IP might work to broaden its work as a leading advocate of IP awareness within CCCC and NCTE. In particular, participants will strategize how CCCC-IP might build professional alliances with, and learn from, other professional organizations who have constructed influential professional identities such as the American Library Association, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition.

Roundtable 3: IP in the Classroom: Pedagogical Approaches

As multimodal composition pedagogies become increasingly prevalent, so does the necessity for student-centered teaching about copyright and fair use. This table invites participants to brainstorm innovative ways to teach IP in composition classroom–when composing with text or in other modalities. As composition students write for print, online, mobile, and presentational formats and for a greater audience diversity than ever before, both teachers and students need to know how to handle a wider diversity of intellectual property issues that arise. We’ll also brainstorm about effective ways to distribute these pedagogies with the wider CCCC community.

Roundtable 4: IP Stories from the Field

Anecdotes about being unable to publish certain video clips or textual sections in scholarly articles, being unable to publish student work that uses particular songs or images, or encountering students whose source use practices challenge our definitions of plagiarism are not uncommon in writing studies teacher-scholar lore. No formalized collection of these stories yet exists, however. This roundtable seeks to change that. For this roundtable we invite Caucus members and visitors to share their stories about and experiences with IP, plagiarism, and copyright issues. We will video record responses to gain a collection of the IP encounters that are part of our professional lives.

The above discussions will take place Wednesday, March 18, from 2:00-5:30 p.m. in Room 18 of the Tampa, FL, Convention Center.

The second event will be a panel, “Twenty Years of CCCC-IP: A Roundtable Discussion on Intellectual Property and Composition Studies,” that will explore what intellectual property has meant and will mean for composition studies. Co-chaired by Timothy Amidon (Colorado State University) and Clancy Ratliff (University of Louisiana at Lafayette), the panel also will include Jeffrey Galin (Florida Atlantic University), John Logie (University of Minnesota, Minneapolis); Jessica Reyman (Northern Illinois University), James Porter, (Miami University), and Nick Shockey, Director of Programs and Engagement at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). Serving as respondents will be Johndan Johnson-Eilola (Clarkson University) and Danielle Nicole DeVoss (Michigan State University). This session is listed in the CCCC program as G.44 and will take place Friday, March 20, from 9:30-10:45 a.m. in the Marriott, Florida Ballroom VI, Level Two.

For more information about the two CCCC-IP sessions, contact this year’s senior chair of the IP Caucus: Tim Amidon. In addition, visit this video introduction to the caucus by Dr. Amidon.

This column is sponsored by the Intellectual Property Committee of the CCCC and the CCCC-Intellectual Property Caucus. The IP Caucus maintains a mailing list. If you would like to receive notices of programs sponsored by the Caucus or of opportunities to submit articles either to this column or to the annual report on intellectual property issues, please contact kgainer@radford.edu.

CCCC IP Committee Website

Previous Reports

The 2014 CCCC Intellectual Property Annual: An Opportunity to Contribute

Open Invitation to the Intellectual Property Caucus @ CCCC Indianapolis, 2014

Intellectual Property-Related Motion at the CCCC Business Meeting

2012 Tri-Annual DMCA Rulemaking Creates Expanded Use Rights for Educators

An Invitation to the Intellectual Property Caucus at CCCC in Las Vegas

A Big Win for Georgia State for Online Reserves

Open Access: Where Next?

Tri-Annual DMCA Rulemaking Process Underway—IP Caucus Member Participates

IP and Your Professional Organizations

A Ruling in the Georgia State University e-Reserve Case

The Lord of the Copyright: An IP Fable

The CCCC-IP Annual: Top Intellectual Property Developments of 2011

An Invitation to a Series of Discussions on Intellectual Property

Another (Short) Tale of Open Access: The HathiTrust Case

‘Hacktivist’ or Thief?: What the Aaron Swartz Case Means to the Open Access Movement

Making Textbooks Afforadable and Open

IP Caucus Roundtable: Students’ Rights to Their Writing and to the Writing of Others

Who Owns Your Digital Fingerprint?: Negotiating an Answer to the Question

Who Owns Your Digital Fingerprint?

Update on Google Book Settlement: What Can Your Students Access?

Report of the Meeting of the Annual CCCC Intellectual Property Caucus

IP Caucus to Meet April 6 in Atlanta

Part Two: What Teachers Can Learn about Fair Use in Remix Writing from the US Copyright Office

Celebrate the Public Domain

Think Locally, Act Globally: Taking US Copyright Reform to a World Stage

YouTube—and Educators—Win!

Fair Use for Researchers in Communication: A Resource

Part One: The New DMCA Exemption for College Teachers and Students

Understanding Fair Use in the Classroom: A Resource

What? You want to copyright your comic!!?

New Copyright “Combat” Regulations For Colleges and Universities Go Into Effect July 1

Stake Your Claim: What’s at Stake in the Ownership of Lesson Plans?

Report on the March 2010 CCCC-Intellectual Property Caucus Annual Meeting, Louisville, Kentucky

The Times, They Are Remixin’: Indaba Music, Creative Commons, and the Digital Collaboration Frontier

The Rhetoric of Intellectual Property: Copyright Law and the Regulation of Digital Culture (Routledge, 2010)

Data Privacy Day 2010 Celebrated January 28

Transforming Our Understanding of Copyright and Fair Use

CCCC’s Intellectual Property Caucus Member, Martine Courant Rife of Lansing Community College, testifies at the DMCA hearings at the Library of Congress

Plagiarism Detection Services: Unsettled Questions

New Edited Collection from IP Caucus member just published: Composition and Copyright

The Google Book Settlement: Implications for Educators and Librarians

July IP Report: “What’s Fair is Foul?”: Understanding Fair Use in the Classroom

Top Intellectual Property Development Annual Series

Introducing NCTE-CCCC’s Intellectual Property Committee and Intellectual Property Caucus

Committee Members

Michael Faris, Chair
Ruben Casas
Marcos Del Hierro
Elizabeth Keller
Daisy Levy
Kristi McDuffie
Dawn Opel
Hannah Rule
James Sanchez
Meredith Singleton
Kathryn Taylor

March 2018 Update

The committee worked with WPA-GO to develop mentorship opportunities at CCCC in Kansas City, including a very successful Mentoring@Cs event that paired graduate student mentees with mentors in the field. Committee members organized a preconference workshop for CCCC 2018, titled “Your Transition Toolkit: Successfully Moving from Graduate Student to Early Career Professional,” to provide mentoring opportunities for graduate students and early career faculty members. The committee runs a website at http://www.4csogs.org/ to share resources with graduate student members.

We’ve drafted a comprehensive report on our survey results, shared with the Executive Committee in November 2014.

Committee Charge

The CCCC Committee on the Status of Graduate Students is charged with promoting and supporting ongoing understanding about all aspects of teaching, graduate study, research, publication, professional development, professional hiring and other issues relevant to the well-being of graduate students as a vital component of our discipline and of the CCCC membership.
 
Charges:

1. To gather information about the needs of graduate students in CCCC. This might include:

• polling membership regarding the effectiveness of CCCC in meeting the needs of graduate students
• identifying other professional academic organizations that have substantial interest in graduate student issues in the humanities and determine what actions they’ve engaged in that CCCC could adapt to suit its own needs reviewing the history of the CCCC with respect to its activities on behalf of graduate students
• survey scholarship in the discipline of Rhetoric & Writing in order to identify work that specifically addresses graduate student issues
• other actions appropriate to the task as the Committee sees fit

2. Identify graduate student concerns that should be brought to the attention of the CCCC Officers and Executive Committee or to the general membership;

3. Recommend appropriate actions to the CCCC Officers and Executive Committee. This might include position statements, support mechanisms, professional development or research opportunities, and future charges for this committee.

The first of the enumerated goals in the Intellectual Property Committee of CCCC’s mission statement reads as follows: “keep the CCCC and NCTE memberships informed about intellectual property developments, through reports in the CCCC newsletter and in other NCTE and CCCC forums.”  To this end, the Intellectual Property Committee is, with this publication, inaugurating an annual report on major developments in intellectual property law, policy, and research. The following three articles — written by scholars from both the Intellectual Property Committee and the Intellectual Property Caucus (CCCC-IP) — will serve to inform and orient others in the field who increasingly find themselves engaged with intellectual property questions as they pursue their teaching and research.

John Logie
Chair, Intellectual Property Committee
Department of Rhetoric
University of Minnesota

Google Faces Legal Challenges in its Effort to Digitize University Library Contents

Krista Kennedy, PhD Student, University of Minnesota
Assistant Chair, CCCC Intellectual Property Caucus

MGM v. Grokster: Implications for Educators and Writing Teachers

James E. Porter, PhD, The WIDE Research Center, Michigan State University
Martine Courant Rife, MA, JD, The WIDE Research Center, Michigan State University

BMG Music v. Gonzalez: Fair Use Tested in a Federal Court

Jessica Reyman, PhD Candidate, University of Minnesota
Assistant Chair, CCCC Intellectual Property Caucus

Committee Members

Michael Faris, Chair
Ruben Casas
Marcos Del Hierro
Elizabeth Keller
Daisy Levy
Kristi McDuffie
Dawn Opel
Hannah Rule
James Sanchez
Meredith Singleton
Kathryn Taylor

March 2018 Update

The committee worked with WPA-GO to develop mentorship opportunities at CCCC in Kansas City, including a very successful Mentoring@Cs event that paired graduate student mentees with mentors in the field. Committee members organized a preconference workshop for CCCC 2018, titled “Your Transition Toolkit: Successfully Moving from Graduate Student to Early Career Professional,” to provide mentoring opportunities for graduate students and early career faculty members. The committee runs a website at http://www.4csogs.org/ to share resources with graduate student members.

We’ve drafted a comprehensive report on our survey results, shared with the Executive Committee in November 2014.

Committee Charge

The CCCC Committee on the Status of Graduate Students is charged with promoting and supporting ongoing understanding about all aspects of teaching, graduate study, research, publication, professional development, professional hiring and other issues relevant to the well-being of graduate students as a vital component of our discipline and of the CCCC membership.
 
Charges:

1. To gather information about the needs of graduate students in CCCC. This might include:

• polling membership regarding the effectiveness of CCCC in meeting the needs of graduate students
• identifying other professional academic organizations that have substantial interest in graduate student issues in the humanities and determine what actions they’ve engaged in that CCCC could adapt to suit its own needs reviewing the history of the CCCC with respect to its activities on behalf of graduate students
• survey scholarship in the discipline of Rhetoric & Writing in order to identify work that specifically addresses graduate student issues
• other actions appropriate to the task as the Committee sees fit

2. Identify graduate student concerns that should be brought to the attention of the CCCC Officers and Executive Committee or to the general membership;

3. Recommend appropriate actions to the CCCC Officers and Executive Committee. This might include position statements, support mechanisms, professional development or research opportunities, and future charges for this committee.

Committee Charge

This CCCC Committee on Diversity is charged to promote and support ongoing dialogues about diversity and difference in all aspects of teaching, graduate study, professional hiring and development, and research on rhetoric, writing, and literacy. This committee has a particular but not exclusive charge to address the concerns and problems of racial diversity in the rhetoric and composition community, given the underrepresentation of people of color in our organization and on college faculties nationwide.

To carry out this general charge this committee is particularly charged

1. To gather data about people of color and other minorities who are members of our professional organization – this includes information such as the degree of diversity of students enrolled in graduate programs, faculty rank and institutional type, representation of diverse scholars & scholarship at our national convention and in NCTE/CCCC publication venues.
2. To poll the membership regarding the effectiveness of CCCC in meeting the needs of our many different constituents, as defined by diverse identity categories such as race, ethnicity, gender, disabilities, sexual orientation, etc.
3. To document and synthesize any data collected from the above efforts, along with scholarship and practical experiences from our members, in order to identify the needs of our membership, and of our discipline, that might appropriately be supported by the CCCC organization or attended to by the CCCC Executive Council.
4. To develop resources that will support our members in engaging in scholarship that directly address diversity issues and/or concerns.
5. To develop resources that will support our members in teaching for diverse student populations, or in teaching diversity-centered curricula to homogenous student populations.
6. To promote the hiring and retention of faculty of color into all departments in which our members are employed.
7. To promote the recruiting and retention of graduate students of color into rhetoric & writing graduate programs and to advocate for diversity-rich graduate curricula.
8. To propose position statements on diversity in the discipline for consideration by the Executive Committee.
9. To combine efforts with other NCTE/CCCC committees where possible to improve efficiency, including the Committee on Disability Issues, the Committee on LGBT/Q Issues, the Committee on Language Policy, as well as with CCCC EC governance groups and Task Forces as is appropriate.

Spring 2014 Update

This CCCC Committee on Diversity is charged to promote and support ongoing dialogues about diversity and difference in all aspects of teaching, graduate study, professional hiring and development, and research on rhetoric, writing, and literacy. This committee has a particular but not exclusive charge to address the concerns and problems of racial diversity in the rhetoric and composition community, given the underrepresentation of people of color in our organization and on college faculties nationwide.

This committee has been working to identify the areas of tension within the organization, and will be moving forward in the next year to craft position statements to submit to the EC. The CCCC Committee on Diversity will also be working with other committees to collaborate on our efforts to promote diversity and inclusion in our organization.

Committee Members

Marisa Klages, Co-chair 
Les Perelman, Co-chair
Bob Broad
Norbert Elliot
Alan Hutchison
Suzanne Labadie  
Patricia Lynne
Jeremy Schnieder
David Slomp
Amy Weaver
Carl Whithaus

November 2015 Update

The Committee on Assessment has been investigating best practices in formative and summative assessment along with efforts to help the discipline successfully critique the machine scoring of essays. We will be publicizing on our web site case studies of exemplary writing assessments in 2 year and 4 year colleges along with updating supporting material for the 2013 NCTE Position Statement on Machine Scoring.

Committee Charge

Charge 1: Keep abreast of changes in assessment of writing policies and computer-graded essay practices for both formative and summative assessments that affect the profession, including PARCC and Smarter Balance proposed assessments for the Common Core Standards, assessment for placement in first-year writing, and assessment practices in both K-12 and college classrooms. Coordinate with other NCTE committees and groups involved in assessment practices.
 
Charge 2: Work with the CCCC Officers, the MemberWeb Editor, and NCTE staff to disseminate the 2009 Position Statement on Assessment and the 2013 NCTE Position Statement on Machine Scoring.
 
Charge 3: Supplement the position statements with bibliographies and links to related position statements and explanations of terms.

Charge 4: Advocate for transparency in multiple aspects of assessment including free and open access to computer grading software and the raw data from major studies involving writing assessment.

Charge 5: Serve as a clearing house for publicizing what writing professionals are doing in writing assessment including developing a web site that will allow writing professionals to share various new and innovative practices.

Committee Members

Marisa Klages, Co-chair 
Les Perelman, Co-chair
Bob Broad
Norbert Elliot
Alan Hutchison
Suzanne Labadie  
Patricia Lynne
Jeremy Schnieder
David Slomp
Amy Weaver
Carl Whithaus

November 2015 Update

The Committee on Assessment has been investigating best practices in formative and summative assessment along with efforts to help the discipline successfully critique the machine scoring of essays. We will be publicizing on our web site case studies of exemplary writing assessments in 2 year and 4 year colleges along with updating supporting material for the 2013 NCTE Position Statement on Machine Scoring.

Committee Charge

Charge 1: Keep abreast of changes in assessment of writing policies and computer-graded essay practices for both formative and summative assessments that affect the profession, including PARCC and Smarter Balance proposed assessments for the Common Core Standards, assessment for placement in first-year writing, and assessment practices in both K-12 and college classrooms. Coordinate with other NCTE committees and groups involved in assessment practices.
 
Charge 2: Work with the CCCC Officers, the MemberWeb Editor, and NCTE staff to disseminate the 2009 Position Statement on Assessment and the 2013 NCTE Position Statement on Machine Scoring.
 
Charge 3: Supplement the position statements with bibliographies and links to related position statements and explanations of terms.

Charge 4: Advocate for transparency in multiple aspects of assessment including free and open access to computer grading software and the raw data from major studies involving writing assessment.

Charge 5: Serve as a clearing house for publicizing what writing professionals are doing in writing assessment including developing a web site that will allow writing professionals to share various new and innovative practices.

The cases represented in this web site are fictional.  Any resemblance between these cases represented here and actual cases is entirely accidental.

The evaluations provided of these cases—by deans, department chairs, and personnel committee chairs—do not represent an official assessment of the CCCC and are not meant to be substituted for the advice of the dean, department chair, and personnel committee chair on a candidate’s own campus.

We suggest the following advice for readers of this site:

• Departments of English should make specific reference to work with digital media in their tenure and promotion guidelines.
• Untenured faculty—and candidates seeking jobs—should access and study departmental and university requirements for tenure and promotion.
• Chairs should meet informally with untenured faculty to keep abreast of their work with technology and meet on a more formal basis, annually, to assess progress toward tenure and promotion and clarify departmental expectations.
• Untenured faculty members should schedule regular meetings with the department chair and/or the chair of the departmental personnel committee to help these individuals understand their work with technology and its general import within the context of the field.
• Department chairs, chairs of personnel committees, and untenured faculty should be aware of relevant professional guidelines for faculty who work with technology:
  • CCCC Promotion and Tenure Guidelines for Work with Technology
  • CCCC Statement of Professional Guidance
  • CCCC Statement on Scholarship in Composition
  • MLA Guidelines for Evaluating Work with Digital Media in the Modern Languages
  • MLA Guidelines for the Institutional Support of and Access to IT for Faculty Members and Student

Tenure and Promotion Cases for Composition Faculty Who Work with Technology