Thing 9

Going Deeper: Copyright & Creative Commons. Copyright is huge as evidenced in the recent downloading trial of a Minnesotan woman who says she is being sought out, picked on & used as an example in Court. Whether that is the case or not, copyright MUST be discussed & taught in context in schools beginning in the primary grades. Students must be taught what is their thinking as opposed to other people's original thinking. After reading the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education by the Action Coalition for Media Education, media Education Fdn, NAMLE, NCTE & Visual Communication Studie Div. of the Intl Comm. Assn, I rerealized the importance of embedding the teaching of copyright with the media literacy unit. I have relearned just how important an awareness of copyright is as well as just how open the fair use policy is. Educators can pretty much do whatever they choose as long as it's in the name of "education." I think that's why the idea of copyright has fallen by the wayside until this particular court case recently came up. According to the article a defn. of fair use is: "Law provides copyright protection to creative works in order to foster the creation of culture" (page 5) of the Fair Use article. Along with that: "Copyright law does not exactly specify how to apply fair use, & that gives the fair use doctrine a flexibility that works to the advantage of users" (page 6) & "fair use is flexible, it is not unreliable" (page 6). Most users are educators and they act in "good faith" in order to teach these policies to students in some shape or form. "Fair use" would be considered for all forms of media. I found this article to be extremely helpful. I am thinking I might want to incorporate parts of it in my teaching next year in reference to this recent court case even though that wasn't for educational purposes.

I also looked at the Creative Commons site but thought more about the Learning Commons we attended on 6/19. I'm still mulling all this over. I'm beginning to understand why it is important to "share" our work with others for the use of common background knowledge & learning but as a new user, I haven't sorted it all out yet. No I haven't ever had any experiences with copyright issues. My first thought was legal and scary, but after reading the article I realized just how unlikely that would be and how "copyright education" ... "has been shaped by the concerns of commercial copyright holders" (page 14). The code of best practices "is shaped by educators for educators & the learners they serve, with the help of legal advisors" (page 14). This must be taught to students, even though one might not like to teach it as it involves the law and it's not the most interesting subject, but students are more responsible for their own learning in the 21st Century. We have a moral obligation to make students aware of this so the recent court case doesn't happen to them.