Beating the No U-Turn Syndrome: a New Approach to Teaching and Enforcing Copyright Compliance

I attended a virtual discussion on copyright and fair use tonight in SecondLife and it has me thinking and rethinking (which I'm sure was Doug's goal)!

I've only been in SL once before and then I found that my machine's video card just wasn't capable of handling the graphics-intensive environment. Tonight, we downloaded and installed on hubby's laptop so that I could participate. I had some issues with lag and corrupted images, but on the whole it worked out really well.

I asked about a specific situation I encountered this year: one of my students was looking for images for a PA History project. The image that he found was on a website where the photographer requested payment for the use of the image. Normally, I would have said that fair use meant he did not need to request permission to use an image, but this situation gave me pause and made me wonder whether the photographer's request for payment meant that the student could not use the image without paying for the rights to do so. What would you have told your student? Doug says he believes that it was likely fair use (but without more specifics he couldn't say for sure.)

Someone else in the audience asked about work that he's creating in the SL world and how to make it available to others without losing credit for the development and creation he's done. Doug suggested he check out Creative Commons licensing for his projects to ensure he has the power he wants but others can still adapt for their own use.

Doug compared current copyright law to the old Blue Laws (like the one that said that more than four women living in a house in the borough of State College was a brothel and therefore sororities were prohibited from having houses like fraternities did.) He says that it's outdated and that mostly it isn't enforced so what's the point? The text of his discussion is available on the wiki.

The one thing that I really like is his suggestion of branding ourselves as a copyright counselor (rather than the copyright Nazi some of my colleagues have deemed themselves--and others have labelled me!) If we talk about what can be done rather than emphasizing what can't, we're their cheerleaders, their helpers, we're enabling success and helping students (and teachers and administrators) to take advantage of open source software, and royalty free and public domain sources.

One database our schools have access to is the Associated Press's Multimedia Archive (I think the name may have changed recently and I don't recall the new one.) I helped a student to find images of 50 Cent there for his project. He was searching images on the web and was coming up with things that were so small that when they were enlarged to the size required for his project they were pixellated and unusable. He was thrilled with the images we got from that database and I have been able to convince others to use it on his recommendation.

#23 Reflections and what's next

Participating in the CSLA's School Library Learning 2.0 program has been beneficial to me. Even though I was familiar with some of the tools that were discussed, I really took the time to reflect on how I can use these in my instructional practice and how my colleagues can use them with students.

Prior to beginning the program, I used many of these tools in my personal life (blogging, flickr, YouTube) as a way to record the things that are going on in my family and so that relatives and friends who live far from us are still able to keep up on what is going on with my children. I've even used my blog as a professional journal to track the things I want to remember related to work, like articles I've read, things I've done in the classroom that have worked well, and my notes on previous professional goals like last year's collection analysis and comparison to the other secondary schools in my district. I've struggled with what's appropriate to put on that personal blog and found that for my own comfort, I really need to keep my personal and professional blogging separate. I expect I'll continue to use this blog professionally because I want to be reflective about my instructional practices.

One of the things that happened this year in my school was very exciting to me: I had a teacher whose professional goal was to have her students blog. A few years ago, I created a blog that I host from our home server called Read Write Think Repeat. We used it briefly during a summer reading program and I also used it to post announcements about new materials as they were purchased. I worked with Robyn and her students to begin using that blog for student-created book reviews and discussion. The students voted to change the name to Rockin' Reads so that's its current title.

Changes in the way our network is administered meant that I can no longer make that page the library computers' homepage. I cannot even add it to the bookmarks on computers as everything is wiped from the history and bookmarks on our computers when someone logs out of them. One of my biggest personal frustrations about technology in our schools is the lack of communication and information sharing that goes on.

To get to my school library site, one has to start at the district website (every computer lab and library computer's homepage), click on schools, click on schools again and find my school in the dropdown list, click on library and the click on website in that dropdown list. It can't be bookmarked by students at school. (Teachers can bookmark it, but based on the phone and email requests I get, I'm pretty sure no one has.)
Because it's not used, I'm not very motivated to work on the site. Because the site has limited use, it's not used. It's a Catch-22. I think I could use the library blog site to be the library website adding pages to it, but that probably involves negotiations with the district technology department to figure out how to make that work. At least it is a relatively easy address to remember.

As a district we applied for the Improving Literacy through School Libraries grant. Technology and technology training is a significant portion of that proposal. Some of the things that teachers said they wanted to learn more about are PowerLibrary (our state-provided online databases), pod/vodcasts, wikis and blogs. I will probably be involved in providing some of those trainings, so participating in SLL2.0 has helped to prepare me for that--but I'll certainly need additional work to provide the best possible training. I've signed up for some training at our state conference and I'll probably do some additional self-discovery and learning to supplement what I've learned from the CSLA program.

I would wholeheartedly recommend this to any teacher, administrator or librarian who wants to learn more about web 2.0 tools. Thank you to CSLA for making it available to anyone! I was supposed to have a partner working on the tutorials with me, someone from LM_NET, but she ended up not posting much after her initial few posts and the emails that I've sent to her asking if she needed help or support have gone unanswered, so I'm not sure what happened to make her abandon the tutorials. We're also supposed to discuss a book we were planning to read together, but I suspect that will go by the wayside as well. I hope it does not impact my evaluation because she hasn't followed through.

A few weeks ago, I found reference to the next 23 things (Library 2.1) from Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public Library and I believe I will continue my learning by doing those things as I have time.