Copyright and Creative Commons
Nets-S standard #3 states that students will know “Research and Information Fluency”. This means that we as teachers must make them aware of copyright laws, how to properly reference any materials under fair use, and also to let them know that in their personal lives this information wouldn’t be so readily available to share.
Copyright laws are in effect to protect the rights of authors, which causes the advancement of knowledge as others must make their own unique material. Exceptions exist for teachers who want to use copyrighted materials as they can use copyrighted materials for strictly educational purposes. If the author of a new book wanted to reserve all the rights of his book and make everyone ask permission to use his ideas he would create a copyright for it. More recently, authors (and other people who create protected works) have been producing works that they don’t mind sharing: they want their ideas to spread and be heard. These authors can get a creative commons license. Creative commons is a relatively new idea that exists to provide the public with more open-ended copyright-licenses. CC allows authors to decide what protections they want for their work under the law and which ones they don’t think are valuable to them.
To be honest, I find the whole legality of copyrighted or somewhat-copyrighted material confusing. Luckily copyrighted materials are not the type of material that I most commonly use. As a teacher of 11th and 12th graders I am able to use many primary sources in my social studies classes. I’m generally opposed to using textbooks (in history primary sources give you raw data; secondary sources, like a book by a historian, try to make conclusions from the data and make conclusions and generalizations, textbooks go a step further and you can’t even remember what your original data looked like anymore). The internet is an excellent place to find primary source information available to teachers. 11th grade history students are able to use sources to get a feel for what it was really like to live in the times we are studying. 12th grade government students are able to read primary documents for themselves, hopefully so they can realize concepts such as that they are part of the people and the people are the government.
I have seen other students post a variety of music sources and I wonder if that’s because it’s what they found that they could use with young students or if they really use that much music in their classrooms. I feel like in an upper-grades social studies class the only use I may have for music is incorporating war-protest music from the Vietnam Era to try to define the period.
Primary Sources
As a teacher of 11th and 12th grades, my primary sources are often very similar to the sources one might use in undergraduate courses. I am student-teaching US History and US Government. The primary sources I use are available digitally in a convenient format. My primary sources consist of historical documents and newspapers as well as more modern materials. In fact, government class often watches political news from the last few days.
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Examples
The Charters of Freedom website is run by the US government and allows students to see the Declaration of the United States, the Constitution of the United States, and the Bill of Rights in their entirety. It also provides information about several of the founding fathers and monumental moments is US history such as the Marbury v. Madison Supreme Court case and the Louisiana Purchase.
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/
PBS has a collection of primary sources related to the Civil Rights Movement such as the new rules for busses in Montgomery after segregation was declared unconstitutional.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eyesontheprize/sources/index.html
The Civil Rights Digital Library has unedited news reports that took place during the Civil Rights Movement
The Library of Congress has a collection of Ansel Adams pictures taken at the Manzanar Japanese Internment camp in California during WWII. There are also many other collections of photographs.
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/manz/
Yale University’s Avalon Project contains many historical documents related to law and diplomacy
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/wwii.asp
The Dwight D Eisenhower Presidential Website has many historical documents including letters written home from wars
http://www.dwightdeisenhower.com/primarysource.html
This site features oral history told by students during WWII through the McCarthy era who participated in the Farm Labor Project. It shows the transition through the post-war era through the point of view of students.
Digital Citizenship
According to a video on the class website (author unknown) Digital Citizenship consists of the norms of appropriate, responsible behavior with regard to technology use. Nine elements that describe it are
1. Digital Access (full electronic participation in society)
2. Digital Commerce (buying and selling online)
3. Digital Communication (electronic exchange of information)
4. Digital Literacy (knowing when and how to use technology)
5. Digital Etiquette
6. Digital Law (legal rights and restrictions governing technology use)
7. Rights and Responsibilities
8. Health and Wellness
9. Digital Security
Wagner states that the 7 Skills Students need for their future are
1. Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
2. Collaboration across Networks and Leading by Example
3. Agility and Adaptability
4. Initiative and Entrepreneurialism
5. Effective Oral and Written Communication
6. Accessing and Analyzing Information
7. Curiosity and Imagination
Digital Citizenship helps all of Wagner’s seven skills students need for their futures, but it particularly helps Collaboration across Networks, Effective Oral and Written Communication, and Accessing and Analyzing Information. Teaching students these skills is something that I believe can be done in content classes while also teaching them their subject matter. For example, I am student-teaching with three different classes: two 12th grade government classes and one 11th grade US History class. Due to our severe lack of textbooks (which I really prefer not to use in the first place) the students use netbooks (given to us by Google – thanks!) to find their material and also to collaborate with their peers by working on projects together using Google docs and sharing their material through “the cloud”.
I also think that having government students maintain a blog for that class may be a good idea. By 12th grade many if not most of them have the computer skills required to write and post a blog. And I feel like it’s an excellent way to have them learn computer skills while still incorporating writing (which is one of Wagner’s 7 ideas but also the skill that our school district is trying to have us focus our attention to more frequently in our social studies classes). This could also allow students to have the freedom of creativity to go off and find news articles, YouTube videos, other blogs, and other resources necessary to get their information ant then to interpret this information on their own. This is Wagner’s sixth idea. Too often I see students worried about thinking or saying the wrong thing and they won’t even try to think for themselves. Yet I see them posting things freely online every day and I’m hoping that this will help bridge the gap with students and allow them to see that school is not a separate entity with little relevance in their lives after it’s over.
Information about etiquette, responsibilities, and copyright law would be presented at the beginning of the term and could be assessed throughout the term. I feel strongly about having students go out and do things on their own rather than rely solely on their teachers for information. The internet is about access to information and telling them about it is far less effective than having them focus on learning about the internet by and for themselves. Younger students need teachers who will hold their hand more throughout this process and let them know everything about what is and isn’t important. I wanted to focus on how this affects me and my students. I’m aware that this article may sound very different coming from an Elementary School teacher.
Privacy and Security
Almost every day I post something on Facebook. It’s generally something unimportant to most people who read it: perhaps some information I came across that I found particularly interesting, or just a gripe about something that happened in my life. It’s not uncommon for me to come across people who post everything they do or think about. This is not only obnoxious, it’s also dangerous. You are giving away information to people, many of whom you don’t know as well as you think you do, and many of whom you don’t know at all. While most of this information is harmless and boring, knowledge of your whereabouts can be threatening to your personal security.
Hasan Elahi gives a story of how his life was affected by the FBI and how he realized that the government can find out all about you from what you post on the internet. Another news story talks about how someone posted that they would be away at a concert and her home was robbed by one of her Facebook friends while she was gone. Bruce Schneier makes the point that because the internet is something you are exposed to frequently, it is something that we feel secure about. And our sense of security does not always relate to how secure we really are. People just aren’t aware that anything you post on the internet is (generally) neither secure nor private
A general rule for posting information should be to not post anything that you wouldn’t want everyone to know. The internet is not a private place; it’s a place for the spread of information. When I stop to think about it, however, I feel that the spread of information is often a good thing if people are wise enough to not do something stupid and to realize that not everyone out there is a good person – but these are the same issues that arise in the outside world as well.
Information is also dangerous to the idea of ignorance. I work with undergrad English Language Learners in other countries, communicating over the internet. Often times we’re friends on Facebook. This is because it’s not a bad medium for learning a lot about someone and their culture in a short period of time. A simple comment of “there are a lot of trees where you live” shows more than one might think at first. A post about how great Barcelona’s “football” team is shows that this student (in what is considered a less-developed country, outside of Europe) keeps up and is interested in world sports. The seemingly irrelevant thoughts and opinions of people from other cultures tells us more about them than reading a textbook on their culture in a much quicker and far less boring way.
Information in itself is often a good thing in most situations. The internet has the potential to both bring people together and tear them apart. The problem arises when people expect privacy when they post things on Facebook or any other part of the internet. It’s designed for sharing information – not hiding it. Problems have arisen for governments when information is leaked, yet the general population always wants to get that information. I suppose the question here comes down to whether you think government should be allowed to work in secret. As a stubborn critic, I am all for transparency.
As a teacher I can explain these concepts to my students. I can tell them about the positive and negative features associated with the openness and freedom of information on the internet. This serves to reinforce the NETS-T Standard 4. Promote and Model Digital Citizenship and Responsibility. Students can learn that the internet is not a safe place to say anything they want to say without restrictions. Students can also learn that information gathered from sites such as Facebook can be useful to understanding the cultures of other people.
Week One: NETS Standards, Communication, and Collaboration
As Sir Ken Robinson states, students are in the most intensely stimulating time in history yet we as educators expect them to pay attention in classrooms in which we give them information which they often see as irrelevant in ways they consider boring. As a high school student I, like many of my peers, struggled to stay awake in class as a lecturer drones on about a subject that I felt disconnected from. I wasn’t a bad student in high school either. Years later as I prepared for testing to get into graduate school I found myself wishing that I had paid better attention in class. Many of the things I was going to be tested on were things that I hadn’t studied since high school.
In order to learn or relearn these things that I hadn’t studied in high school I first spent a lot of time reading textbooks. This was somewhat effective for the 10-20 minutes at a time that I could actually concentrate on it, but I felt like I was merely trying to memorize a few facts. Frankly, it felt like high school again. One day I was having difficulty figuring out the difference between supply and aggregate supply. I googled it and wound up watching a few YouTube videos on the subject. I realized that this was a much more effective way of learning things. If one speaker’s video didn’t seem clear to me another’s would. Also, well-made videos would often have visuals that would make it much clearer. This is only the tip of the iceberg. The internet is allowing people to spread ideas and opinions in ways that were not available before.
The spread of these ideas also allows people to work together from different location. Howard Rheingold uses the example of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is formed from the combined efforts of people around the world. Experts in their particular field can write the articles on their subjects instead of relying on others. Also, the internet provides much more room for articles than a textbook or encyclopedia could and this information is more readily available. Instead of searching through a textbook, students only have to enter a keyword into a search. If they find a term or concept they don’t understand they can click a hyperlink to easily access more information.
This year’s Horizon Report shows ways that students and educators can use technology in the classroom. Mobile phones can do more than just allow people to talk and text from just about anywhere (as if that weren’t already enough); many cell phones allow students to download various educational (or completely non-educational) apps. Most conveniently, however, they allow students to access the internet from many different locations. Last year I was annoyed that one of my students was on his cell phone during my lecture on the geography of Europe so I walked behind him to see what was so important and I saw him googling “why is the Black Sea black”. He was interested in something I was saying and wanted to explore this (if only they were always on their phones for educational purposes).
The internet has also led to a dramatic increase in the number of people who are able to spread their ideas. Rheingold explains how it’s not only those who have enough money to buy a printing press or own a radio station (among other methods) who can get their message across. If I had a message that I wanted to get out to people in Australia I could do it instantly by posting on a blog and (assuming they were interested and willing to read it) anyone with internet access could read about it. This has allowed the power of knowledge to both come from and go to anyone. It’s allowed for better knowledge that is more readily available.
Knowing this it seems strange that educators aren’t more willing to embrace the uses of the internet in education. Sir Ken Robinson thinks that educators are stuck in the mind-frame of what education was during the enlightenment and industrial revolution: that education is designed to make people good factory workers or academics – depending on certain factors. He argues that school bells, classes based on students’ ages, and the division of information into separated subjects is reminiscent of 18th and 19th century industrialism. He calls for a change in the educational paradigm to one that is less focused on traditional classrooms to what that feels more organic now. I find this term a paradox. Robinson uses the term organic learning to describe how students naturally learn. In our technological era this includes using technology that students are already used to using in their daily lives instead of anaesthetizing them so that they can sit in classrooms and zone-out while someone lectures for hours.
Educators are also hesitant to include technology in their classrooms because they aren’t as familiar with it as their students are (In my 5th grade typing class they were trying to teach us how to type words on a keyboard; all the students were already able to type, operate the basic functions of a computer, and surf the internet – which was so much more exciting back then in 1998). Many of the staff I work with graduated from college in the 70’s or 80’s and they need help from the library aid to help them with the most basic of internet searches. Learning more and changing the way they approach technology would allow them to provide more enriching classes.
NETS standards show educators and students what they should know about technology in the classroom. NETS-S is designed for students and NETS-T is designed for teachers. As a teacher I am expected to: 1. Facilitate and Inspire Student Learning and Creativity 2. Design and Develop Digital Age Learning Experiences and Assessments 3. Model Digital Age Work and Learning 4. Promote and Model Digital Citizenship and Responsibility 5. Engage in Professional Growth and Leadership.
But what does this really mean to me? At first it sounds like a bunch open-ended government-endorsed standards that someone wrote so that they can feel like they’re actually doing something (and part of me is still convinced that that’s part of it). These standards tell me that I should USE technology in my classroom for the reasons that I described at the beginning of this entry. I’m not an expert on technology, and after taking only this one required course in CSE I probably won’t be an expert on it when I leave my program. I can’t teach my students much about how to use technology, but most of them already have some grasp of it or can learn about it from their peers. I can use internet resources in my classroom to enrich the experiences of my students and I can make sure that they are using the technology appropriately (Digital Citizenship).
Introduction
Hello there! I am Rachel Johnson and I am writing this blog for my CSE 624 class at Western Oregon University. I am working towards my Masters of Arts in Teaching degree at WOU. I received my Bachelors from WOU as well in Geography in 2010. I now live in Astoria, Oregon where I play my clarinet, work hard, and read constantly in the liquid sunshine.
Rachel Johnson 