I’ve been thinking a lot lately about collaboration in learning and, in particular, collaboration between students of different cultures.  There seems to be a few obstacles, at least in the Australian setting.  Approximately 25% of students  at Griffith are international and I suspect it is much higher in the post-graduate courses.  Last semester, in one postgraduate course I taught, there were 3 local students out of more than 100.  This semester, I have about 4 out of 40.  That’s a significant number.

But the problems that I really want to solve are the cultural differences, not just between students, but the difference between the expectations of academia and the expectations of the so-called remix culture.  It seems to me, that the students I deal with are not yet of that culture (no, not even the Gen-Y students) and their understanding of key aspects of technological change is sadly lacking.

The manifestation of the remix culture in academia seems to have become what I have termed the ‘copy and paste collective’ and while the two seem almost the same, the fundamental difference is the attribution aspect of the process.  When we copy a piece of music, we can almost hear the attribution.  If we know the music in that genre, we know where it comes from.  It can be less obvious when it comes to text. But the same action is viewed less favourable.  You just can’t copy and paste in academia.  There’s a whole slew of actions that must accompany that.

I think the creative commons movement is helpful in this respect. Unpacking remix rights into attribution, derivation and commercialisation makes it easier to explain the whole heap of ways to use things.  I think we need to emphasis to student these different parts of using other work.  Most academic work, and the way it is used within academia is By-NC.  You must acknowledge where it came from (attribution), but you may not use it commercially (generally speaking, there may be exceptions).

This is not what I started out to write about, but the next post will deal with the fears that students have about others ‘stealing’ their work.  That’s kind of ironic when so many of them forget to attribute the information they have used.