Why do people share their personal information on their Facebook and blogs?

If people value their privacy, why do they share personal information on their Facebook pages and in their blogs?

After considering this question, I opened my Facebook account and reviewed my privacy settings. There are always updates to the privacy settings that are sent to my e-mail account, and many times I simply click the “agree” button because I am too busy at the time to review the policy changes. So, I took the time to see exactly what I was sharing. And I made several changes to my settings after reviewing that I was sharing some items with public, and that people could find my profile using my e-mail address or my phone number. From this observation, I think that many people simply post personal information without really knowing “what” they are sharing with the public. They may be thinking that they are simply sharing information with family or friends, but the reality might be that their information is searchable by anyone using a browser. The privacy settings are somewhat difficult to find as you must go into settings to make changes, and they aren’t accessed from the pages you visit most often like your profile or timeline.

In addition, I don’t think that a high percentage of people have had something “bad” happen to them because they were choosing to share photos, locations, or other identifying information. You hear of cases where information published on Facebook has led to a crime; however, the numbers of people who have been affected are few. So, people are likely to post personal information because their circle of family and friends has not been affected in a negative way for doing so.  

I use Blogger for my blog postings, and I know that by default all my blogs are searchable and viewable by public. So, I think that some of the same premises for Facebook can be applied to why people share private information on their blogs. However, I also think that people use blogs to promote their professional knowledge and are more likely to want to share their information and knowledge with other Internet users. People can establish a business by blogging their expertise in a particular subject if they have an advertising agreement and a large group of followers.  

How does Creative Commons affect an individual's copyright protection?

Stanford law professor, Lawrence Lessing, understood that in some instances copyright laws were too restrictive and prevented the use of intellectual property unless a person gained specific permission from the copyright holder. However, if a person decides to license their intellectual work with a creative commons copyright license, they have more control of specifying how users may utilize their intellectual work. For example, a person may choose not to allow someone to use their work for commercial purposes. Or someone may stipulate that the work such as a photograph may be utilized for noncommercial purposes or for commercial purposes as long as credit is given to the creator. The creative commons website allows a person to select from six different licenses. The person that holds the copyright license then has the authority to choose the license that best fits their needs. Therefore holding a creative commons copyright protects the individual’s intellectual work, but also gives the creator of the work options of how others may utilize their work without necessarily having to contact the copyright holder to ask for permission. And if an individual is interested in using the copyrighted material for commercial purposes, then an agreement can be established between the two parties.

Why is texting more popular than making phone calls?

My niece asked me if I would pick up a few items for her before she headed back to college. I explained that I would be glad to help out and that I would get in touch with her over the weekend. So, I made a special trip on a Saturday to begin my search for a few of the items in which she had requested. That morning, I called her on her cell phone to clarify a few things before I bought them, but, she did not answer my call. However, no more than thirty seconds later, she sent me a text message which stated, “What do you need?” I absolutely thought that I was going to run off of the road. I explained that I needed her to call me! When she called me, she could not understand why I was so furious with her text message response to my phone call.

I posed this question in a Twitter hashtag this morning to my technology staff and later discussed their answers in our meeting to help me get some perspective on this situation. My staff members that are about thirty years and younger all agreed that texting is the best form of communication because they could multitask, it was a fast way to communicate a brief response, and that it was considered awkward talking in a phone conversation. They also agreed that in a text message you could think about your response a little longer than in a conversation. When I asked if this form of social culture or interactions with others was the new norm, they quickly responded yes. However, the older than thirty generation spoke up and interjected that while they liked to text message and could see the advantages in which the younger staff members had mentioned, that they could still see the need for conversation over messaging for some situations.

This made me think about a recent problem of instructional practice that we identified as a district. The problem identifies that students are not responding during discussions at the higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy and are having a hard time articulating their thoughts. It makes you wonder if the use of texting over face-to-face and phone conversations is helping to create this problem of practice in which we have identified and are targeting district-wide.

What is "Fair Use" in the Context of Copyrighted Material?

In order to explain “fair use” the idea of intellectual property should be explained. Intellectual property is a product such as a book, music, movie, or invention that is generated by the creativity of an individual and has commercial value. Copyright provides the creator or author with rights concerning their work and the ability to give others the same rights. The author or owner has the right to reproduce, distribute, display copies in public, perform the work in public, and produce new works derived from copyrighted work.

However, in the context of fair use, it is sometimes legal for others to reproduce copyrighted work without permission. The Copyright Act lists four factors that need to be considered in order to determine if the material is considered “fair use.” Four questions that should be considered to help define if the material is in the realm of fair use are: the purpose and character of use, the nature of the work being copied, how much of the work is being used, and how will the use affect the market value for the copyrighted work?

Our book provided two scenarios to help you understand the process of determining if the conditions were in favor of fair use. I am very familiar with the first example because when I attended college for my bachelor’s degree, I had to get my English materials from Kinko’s. I would pay for entire articles to be copied, but never wondered if it was a violation of copyright since Kinko’s was a well-known and established chain of stores. When you exam the four questions in this example, three of the four factors weigh in favor of fair use, so it would appear that the professor’s actions were within the realm of fair use when reproducing copyrighted journal articles.

Deciding if something is fair use is still very subjective, thus making it hard to enforce the rules and consequences of reproducing copyrighted material. To make it even more difficult, images and text are easy to snip and copy from the Internet. Teachers and students aren’t aware or considering if they are reproducing someone’s intellectual work without permission because it is so readily available to them, and they aren’t using for profit. However, there are more factors to consider.

References

 

Quinn, Michael J. Ethics for the Information Age. Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2011. Print.