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.

 

 

What is a Blog?

Here is a quick video for the new Castleberry Bloggers that explains the various parts of a blog!

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Wrapping my Mind Around how to Implement Instructional Rounds from a Digital Leader's Perspective

Today, I attended the 1st day of a very beneficial training for our district called, Instructional Rounds in Education. Our presenter, Dr. Sheila Maher, held everyone's attention and kept me contemplating the use of technology in the classroom and asking myself what is the main problem of practice when it comes to students using technology to learn?

Just like in many districts, we employ technology support staff, provide technology professional development, provide support documents and websites for teacher use; however, there seems to be only a few pockets of  student improvement in learning geared to the higher level of  Bloom's Digital Taxonomy. Teachers, technology coaches, instructional administrators, and myself are all working many hours in hopes of seeing student learning improve through the use of technology resources.

This year my department will spend time researching and asking the question of what are the problems of practice when it comes to implementing technology to increase student learning? We will begin this journey by identifying what specific technology tasks can illicit the higher level learning skills that our students need in order to be prepared for living in the 21st Century. The CISD Bloom's Digital Taxonomy is a good place to start, but we know that technology support resources should be reviewed and dynamic in nature to reflect proven strategies.

http://www.castleberryisd.net/departments/technology_services/bloom_s_digital_taxonomy/

Winding School Down and Preparing for the 2014-2015 School Year

The end of the year brings excitement as you begin to establish new goals for the up and coming school year; yet, it also brings closure to some goals and objectives that were accomplished during the previous year. As I look back at the technology target objective, I am happy with the progress that the district has made in the implementation of technology into the classroom. Many successes can be counted; however, as a district we still have room to grow. Students utilize technology on a daily basis outside of the classroom. It is our job to incorporate the tools in which our students use outside of the school walls into the classroom as a tool for learning. The first step is to create digital leaders who can model the use of technology when leading their campuses. This summer, our administrative leaders will complete a book study on Digital Leadership by Eric Sheninger. Click the link for a recent interview posted on Youtube. The book study will help all of our administrators develop into digital leaders who use the power of social media to communicate the positive aspects of our district to everyone. I am looking forward to another successful year and growing with each of you as we continue to become digital leaders in Castleberry ISD.