Copyright in a Digital Age

After listening to Collette Vogele's podcast I was glad that I stressed to students the 4 points of fair use in my copyright lesson.  I summarized my thoughts and questions I had as they went through each point during the podcast.

Fair Use 1: What is the nature of the content - highly creative or more fact based?

Fair Use 2: How much of the content?  They mentioned there really is no 30 second rule time limit on audio? I knew though that I had heard this several times in library land so I looked it up.  Although it may not be part of the statute, it is frequently part of guidelines that get developed because the fair use terms are so general.  For example, it is mentioned here on the The University of Maryland website under guidelines of music and here on Cyberbee, a popular copyright curriculum for kids maintained by previous Ohio State University professors.  It is an answer for the question, "Does it matter how much of a song or video I use?"

Fair Use 3: What is the purpose and character of the use - is it transformative? I was glad to hear that linking to someone else's website is not infringing! Flickr is a great site to teach students how to attribute rights to their own works and I wanted students to publish their digital image project we did and give their image rights but Flickr is blocked. I still have a question about people posting Youtube videos on FB is this copyright infringement?   

Also, in the podcast they mentioned that if you take the photo then you own it.  However, what if you take a photo of someone else's creative work and don't give it attribution?  What if you do attribute it? For example, here is a photo I have of my Uncle Hank's painting:

.. well I attributed it to him.  This was one of my favorite paintings at my grandmother's when I was growing up.


Fair Use 4: What effect does it have on the market?  The example of thumbnail images was a good example of how easily gray areas can arise in the fair use statute. A thumbnail image may not harm the market for selling high quality photos, however it may harm a market for selling images that people want to view on their cell phones.

I also taught my students  that as soon as they have created something reproducible it is copyrighted and protected by default.  They loved this, and I showed them how creative commons is built on this.


Finally, I don't think people realize how important laws like the Digital Milllennium Copyright Act not only effect our rights to our own work and to using other's works, but their outcomes are also relevant to protecting our intellectual freedom and our right to free speech.

 

Flipped Teaching

I am interested in trying a flipped approach with some content to teaching technology next year.  I could try flipping instruction when students learn a new program such as Windows Movie Maker.  This could be a great example where they can watch a video outside of class so when it is time to work in class they have been exposed to the material.  I am not sure I could find a tutorial using Windows Movie Maker that includes an interactive assessment of using it.  Although we have several students with no computers and/or no internet I would help them find time at school to watch the videos.  I haven’t made any video tutorials yet and would like to start using Jing.  I also have no experience recording myself with a webcam and would like to push myself to try these tools. I also discovered the new Qwiki tool to create content.  It looks like something I may be able to have students use, too.  They are in trial stage at this point.

Blogs for Schools

Blogs are great tools for practicing writing and excellent resources for classrooms.  Kids get excited about blogging because they can express themselves creatively.  I am new to blogging and created one once before for a course but never posted after that.  I set up a blog roll on this blog so you can see some of my favorite blogs.  I have not used blogs with students yet but would like to start using them to practice creative and persuasive writing, and the peer review process. 

The best thing about blogs and what is great about them for student use is that they are a form of personal expression.  This is why I find it challenging for myself because I am shy at personal expression, however I like that they are forcing me to express myself. 

Funny when I asked my son about some different names of a blog, he would say "No, mom.  That's not a good name, who would search that."  I thought it was interesting that he knew intuitively growing up in a digital world that if  you want to be effective publishing content on the web then make sure the search engine will find it.