Week 3...

I first started to write this refection earlier in the week when I finished the readings, videos, assignment questions, and discussion post. I realized I needed to let all of that settle before I launched into a raving complaint about this week’s design. I also realize that my feelings of resentment have not entirely dissipated. It isn’t that I don’t see the value of studying and learning about copyright law and plagiarism; it’s quite opposite, in fact. These are topics that we need to be paying more attention to and make sure they fit into our curriculum (more on this later). However, I’m missing COVA with this course. I’m missing discussion prompts that actually promote something of a natural discussion - not much can be commented on someone’s definition of copyright infringement. And I feel bad for whoever has to read these 500 words each week. Now that that is out of my system, let’s talk about the other issue at hand - teaching our learners the importance of copyright law and understanding fair use as teachers.

As an ELA teacher at the secondary level, I spend quite a bit of time dealing with plagiarism. I’ve had students plagiarize in order to get the end result quicker, to get a good grade, or simply because they didn’t understand what they were doing was a form of plagiarism. My biggest take-away this week is that we need to do more to ensure our students understand why attribution is so important. It goes well beyond plagiarism and risking getting caught. This should be happening across the curriculum. Students find information so quickly and it becomes second nature to them to use that information, picture, idea in whatever project they are working on. More often than not, the act of plagiarizing is something they don’t even realize they are doing. Now, this isn’t a cop-out for them, but it is a realization that because of the easy access to information, it is that much more important to teach about copyright laws.

Along with copyright laws, there is the fair use doctrine. As a teacher and learner, this enables me to do much more for educational purposes. Fair use still requires attribution and not everything falls into this category, but without it, I would hardly ever be able to find and use information to share with my students. This is extremely helpful when planning a unit. Most literary pieces are not included, but it is much easier to reach out to an author and ask permission, than it is to have to pay a fine (which we would all struggle with according to this Time Magazine article). Even though I’m frustrated with some of the material and tasks, information was not lacking in this module.

The many aspects of digital citizenship are important, but I’m wondering why we aren’t asked to make any connections to our change initiative in this course. Ultimately, in spite of what I will call busy work this week, I am looking forward to next week’s topic of cyberbullying.