Image from Flickr.com by kevin yezbick
Digital literacy and digital citizenship has been a recent topic among the faculty at my school. We want students to be able to find digital content and be able to analyze its validity. The phrase good digital citizen has many meanings depending on the context that you are using it in. One area that I have been focusing on is copyright laws and how this relates to my students being good digital citizens. In the education field I see photos being pulled off the Internet without any mention of the artists or link to the original photograph. Students dragging and dropping photos into a project without any understanding of the copyright laws or fair use rights for education. This weeks reading on copyright issues identify and describe the key points that students and teachers should know. Teachers should be giving students resources to copyright free material. Students should understand what can be copyrighted and what cannot be. When we look at copyright issues students today are producing more video projects to present during class time. I find they choose popular songs recorded by artists and do not have permission to use their music. By offering students alternative ways to produce their own original music for soundtracks or introductions to presentations we are fostering more creative projects but also educating students how to be a good digital citizen. Copyright issues go beyond the classroom when you look at school district performances, battle of the bands, and dances for fundraisers. In conjunction with our town officials we pay a licensing fee to broadcast music Inc. that gives the artists and composers royalties for the music that we will broadcast during special events. This is a general blanket that covers the town and the school district to perform without infringing on copyright laws. Finally the keyword still is education. Teachers need to understand the black-and-white of copyright laws and teach students how to access media responsibly.
David,
ReplyDeleteI commend you for teaching students on how to create their own original music. There is so much out there in terms of free sampled instruments and beats that anyone could create something amazing and original. I can’t imagine if musical elements like that didn't exist in the realm of creative commons or even royalty free. I mentioned earlier in a post to Michael Wood about an open source 3D application called Blender, but I’m also finding a lot of open source music software too. Applications like Hydrogen, Ardour, and even Audacity have been improving rapidly in the open source market, and just like embracing media licensed under creative commons, open source software rips away the cost of expensive software and gives us the freedom to create and share.
David,
ReplyDeleteI love the idea of teaching students how to become "good digital citizens." I used to do things like this with my Girl Scout troop. I completely agree that we as teachers to need to share in the responsibility of teaching our students about the copyright laws along with its fair use. It sounds like you are already getting a good handle on this and even giving your students other avenues to explore in obeying these copyright laws. I do feel that it would be easier as an educator though to have one of those little books that was shared with us in the videos we watched this week to help give us an overview of exactly what we should be teaching our students in regards to copyright considering the digital age we are in.
David - you are right on with this post! These are also thoughts that I had, but did not use in my blog post. I think the responsibility is to teach the students how important it is to respect the artists and the copyright laws. Do you have students who use Lime-wire or Bit-Torrents? My students have told me about those. It seems like they can get everything for free! But - if we, as the adults (as you eloquently pointed out) teach respect and responsibility, then there is hope that the students will do the right thing. Nicely done Dave.
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