According to “Open the Future,” teachers nowadays have
the capability to claim anything that they’ve created as their own. Society even encourages this. However, teachers must be open with what they
know for learning to occur. Ideas and
knowledge can easily be given away without us losing what we shared in the
process. Also, we should use the
technology at our hands to build a larger academic community, not restrict and
delete information once our classes have moved on. Perhaps education is not the ideal field for
people who are so protective of their ideas.
Technology can only hinder us if we continue to keep it so closed to
others.
According to “Worlds in Collision, Copyright, Technology,
and Education,” it is difficult to figure out what is right and wrong as far as
technology goes. There is a large
learning curve, and even the intellectual property law has become blurry. Students can mix and combine old contents to
form new ones. Copyright law is a deeply
complicated nightmare that can be very hard to figure out. The TEACH act has attempted to aid educators,
resulting in a “set of responsibilities and conditions that require educators
to act on behalf of the interests of copyright owners.”
The video “A Fair(y) Use Tale” discusses copyright using
clips from many Disney films. It talks
about how you cannot use any copyrighted works without the permission of the
creator, and likely some form of payment.
You can’t copyright an idea, but you can copyright its form (picture,
video, etc.) Copyrights end after 14
years. However, they keep extending how
long it lasts before it enters the public domain. Teachers can use small amounts of copyrighted
works.
What is the point of being selfish with our personal
work? We want to use what others have
produced without consequences, so we should extend the same courtesy to
them. However, we must always be careful
with the resources we use. Proper
respect needs to be given to the publishers, etc; even when we think we are in
the right. It is good that even with so
many laws and limitations surrounding copyrights and their uses, we still have
some protections and rights to use works in our classrooms!
In our classrooms, the grey area between following and
breaking copyright laws can be very scary!
All teachers should strive, therefore, to give credit where it is due,
even if our sole motivation is to avoid getting hit with a lawsuit. There are many things that we can do
personally to help change this selfish culture.
As educators, we are already pre-disposed to creating good ideas and
sharing them with our classes (otherwise we would never have lessons to teach!) If we could extend this sharing attitude
further into the school-wide and public sectors, perhaps others would begin to
follow suit and the world would become more open. There is no reason to keep our ideas so
hidden. Parents, students, and other
teachers can all benefit from what we have to offer, even if they use only a
small strategy/game/method that they found interesting. Our goal should always be to increase the
worldwide intellectual “database,” literally and figuratively. This is the definition of what teachers do!
