Public Student Work and Copyright Issues? Oh yeah...

Yet another useful tip from Andy Carvin will follow my last post quite nicely. Copyright questions become ever more important as the technologically blessed classroom that David Warlick has suggested becomes more and more of a reality. As students publish more and more work to the web, they may want to copyright their own work, and they may also want to use work that is copyrighted by others. Carvin explains the dilema and a possible solution:

Young people need to learn that incorporating other people’s original work is fine for personal use, but the moment they put content online, it’s a whole new ballgame. And since I’m not aware of any school having a line item in their budget for students to license commercial music and video clips, they need to find other sources of content that won’t cost them any money. That’s where Creative Commons enters the picture.

Carvin explains that before creative commons licences, content producers only had two options for sharing their work. One option was to declare their work “public domain,” allowing anyone in the world to use it - and profit off of it. The other option was to declare it “All Rights Reserved” - which is a simple way of saying, “If anyone wants to use this content for any reason whatsoever, you need to negotiate with me first.” Neither of these options was ideal for millions of people who simply wanted to have their original content used by others without getting exploited in the process.

This whole issue is something I didn't really think about when I was "Posibility Thinking" about tech in the classroom. I think that copyright issues are certainly important to be aware of however. I certainly don't want to be responcible for encouraging or requireing students to break the law. I know that these things are usually done unintentionally, but as educators we should be proactive about them. I spent some time searching with the Creative Common's search engines. There are a lot of pictures and even songs I found that could be very useful in student projects. I think the potential for using this type of search for educational purposes will improve as content continues to be available and people continue to tag their creative works. Ultimately the biggest downfall is time, like anything else. Mainstream art and music which is under "all rights reserved" copyright may still have more appeal. It takes more time to search for songs you're not familiar with for instance, that you would want to use in a podcast for a school project. Still, I think creative commons the best solution to the copyright problem that many of us simply ignore.

Encouraging Student Creativity with Creative Commons
August 1, 2006
by Andy Carvin, 10:41AM
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