This week we talked about Copyright

Hello again. The topic in tech class this week is about legal issues, ethics and responsibilities around use of copyrighted material.

I’m not sure why or how, but this has always been a hot topic for me. A close friend of mine once commented on my 1970’s Catholic school education and the fact that one of my jobs through high school and college was baseball umpire to imply that my world may be a little less gray than other peoples. That may have something to do with it, but whatever the case, this issue is always something I try to be aware of.

The first two questions I was asked to reflect on is a teacher’s responsibility in knowing, following and instructing the copyright laws. This is a bit of an easy one for me, since it is everybody’s responsibility to know and follow these. As educators, we need to ensure we model appropriate behavior for our school community by properly using and citing our sources. Since much of what we will be using can fall under Fair Use, I think we should go a bit further and explain that concept anytime we use copyrighted material, even before we think kids would understand what it means.

We all try to instill responsible behavior in kids about things when we tell them to use nice words. This is getting more important as our society is trying to catch up to reduce the now exposed culture of harassment and bullying that we implicitly condoned in the past. Although the victims suffer very different consequences, we should also realize that our society is also pretty much OK with theft of intellectual property. The easy of copying and manipulating digital images and files has led to a “finder’s – keeper’s” mentality. This is a reality for today’s kids and we need to address it. As a classmate very eloquently reminded me this week (a shout out and Thank You to Laine), kids today are growing up in a digital world and not the world I grew up in. While current adults were taught it’s not OK to take a friend’s toy, now we need to teach kids it’s also not OK to take Beyoncé’s music.

I really liked the one video we watched about instructing kids on copyright and Fair Use from TeachingChannel and common sense media. The way Novella Bailey combined the basic skill of using evidence to support opinions with the basics of Fair Use helped me to understand how critical thinking skills can be taught with just about any academic topic. I also am impressed about how this is presented to middle school students as a major issue. Dealing with copyright is an important skill that kids need to learn to participate in society. I haven’t seen where it is included in the Ohio Learning Standards, but I think it’s interesting the California addressed (as I found on the Electronic Frontier Foundation site about Teaching Copyright.)

I think I might have had an easier time with the previous reflection on sharing if this topic was first. To me, this order feels a bit like getting the classroom portion of Driver’s Ed after the actual driving practice. Maybe it’s just my stuffiness, but I like knowing ground rules before starting a game instead of finding them out as I go.

The last prompt deals with ethical issues around movie and music downloading and how we help students learn them. As I mentioned earlier, I think this starts early by adults teaching kids that “borrowing” something from the internet without paying is no different than “borrowing” something from the store without paying. This can be tough when you talk about converting files you already paid for from one format to another for personal use (you can find it’s OK or you can find it might be OK, depending on who you ask), but we should start with things that are clearly illegal. We really don’t need to get too caught up in making this a specific ethical issue if we do a good job modeling behavior that starts with complying with the law. Driver’s Ed teachers don’t go into the ethics of running stop lights, but they do instruct students about the illegality of it. And it’s just as easy and tempting to run the red light as it is to “share” a music file.

Finally, Creative Commons is really cool. At least for me, it’s nice to know that somebody is working to make sharing easier while still respecting the wishes of the owner of the intellectual property.