Copyright and Copyleft
Thursday, November 25th, 2004A couple of years ago, I was asked to visit a local high school to observe how an ESL teacher was “integrating technology” into her class. During the hour that I observed, students spent most of their time copying as many images as they could from the internet and pasting them in to their own PowerPoint presentations. Not a single student in the class made a reference to the owner of the images they had copied. When I mentioned it to the teacher, it seemed as thought she had never thought about it before. About a year later I had the opportunity to help my friend’s son finish a homework assignment. His assignment was finished very quickly by using Google Images to create a picture explanation of a topic he was learning about in his science class. When I asked him if he was going to say where he got the images from, he looked at me like I was crazy. “Why would I do that?” he said. These two experiences made me realize that, as teachers, we are doing a pretty weak job of teaching copyright to our students. Somehow the hallowed laws of plagiarism that exist when writing a paper, don’t seem to apply when using electronic media. In instructional design, copyright is an ever present issue as well. Dwight Laws, director of independent study at BYU, talks about the great effort they go through to avoid including copyright materials in their courses. Because of the obvious lack of preparation in teacher education, and the need for copyright information in instructional design, I’ve made a list of copyright links that I use on a regular basis. If you are interested in learning more about copyright, follow the link below.