Week #9 Blog Post - Creative Commons

My undergraduate degree is in Art and Technology, with an emphasis in photography, so I actually have a good amount of first hand experience when it comes to Creative Commons and Copyright laws. For anyone who is not familiar with the intricacies and variations on Copyright laws, I thought that both of these videos did an excellent job explaining the subject thoroughly. 

As a teacher, it is our responsibility to model ideal, legal behavior for our students when presenting lessons with images and video. Students need to understand that they cannot simply appropriate what they see on the internet and call it their own. The idea of fair use is pretty closely tied to the idea of teaching proper citation, which is often hilighted as a subject incoming college students know the least about. Its probably fair to assume then that copyright laws fall under that category as well. Unfortunately, digital plagiarism happens all the time. Photography and graphic design suffer from theft the most because they are the easiest to appropriate! For instance, if I am making a brochure for my small business but don't want to hire a photographer to make art for it, I can very easily pull images off of the internet and just hope that the owner of those images never finds out that my small business appropriated their image for my brochure! Though wrong, this kind of theft happens all the time! As educators, it is our responsibility to make sure our students are aware of the proper way to use and appropriate content into their own creations. There is an excellent website with a creative commons and copyright curriculum located here.

I love teaching my students to take their own photos!

That being said, I happen to work in special education and in this field in particular, taking time to teach kids about citation and creative commons laws seems like a bit of a luxury. In many instances, I am lucky if I can get my children to grasp concrete ideas and concepts, getting them to abide by some distant and abstract concept such as copyright feels like a bit of a stretch to me. To complicate things, I also work at a behavior program, so many of my students are already involved with the law for felony actions, it feels like reaching to get them to care about what might happen if they appropriate an image unlawfully when some of them are here for stealing cars. The way I feel about all of this in the special education setting is that so long as no one is making any money off of someone elses' work, its not a problem for me. I will always teach students that it is best to use their own content, however, rather than to take others. If students are always creating their own content, then there isn't as much of a chance that they fall into the hole of unlawful appropriation! In my classroom, since we have limited access to computers anyways, original content creation is the way to go!