Piecing Together the Copyright Puzzle

Figuring out copyright can be like piecing together a puzzle. You have a good idea how it’s supposed to work in the end, but all the little pieces can be confusing to piece together.

These links can help you learn more about copyright yourself and teach students about fair use and copyright. In no time, you’ll move from scattered pieces to a full picture of copyright and fair use.

Classroom Resources

Check out the Media Education Lab website for key resources and curriculum materials. The site includes links to My Pop Studio, which focuses on media literacy for girls 9–14, and Assignment Media Literacy resources for K–12 students. You’ll find songs and video clips that you can use with students or in your professional development workshops.

Copyright on the Web, from CyberBee, is a simple FAQ interactive that younger students can explore to learn more about copyright.

Older students can use the Digital Slider from the Copyright Advisory Network to test whether the works they want to use are covered by copyright. The Fair Use Evaluator, also from the Copyright Advisory Network, steps content creators through the process of creating a fair use defense.

Teaching Copyright, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), is a collection of five lesson plans on copyright, fair use, file sharing, and remixing.

The Fair Use section of the Center for Social Media website includes teaching materials and educational resources on fair use of documentary film and online video.

The Campus Guide to Copyright Compliance from the Copyright Clearance Center provides a thorough overview of copyright, fair use, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Copyright, from University Publishing of Washington State University, recommended by NCTE & CCCC member William Condon, includes information on everything about copyright from music to the Internet. The Public Domain Chart and Fair Use section are great classroom resources.

In addition to resources on copyright, you may want to know something about Creative Commons. For a great overview, check out “The Beauty of ‘Some Rights Reserved’: Introducing Creative Commons to Librarians, Faculty, and Students” from the November issue of the Association of College and Research Libraries publication C&RL News. The About section of the Creative Commons website offers movies, comics, and FAQs.

Issues for Discussion

If you’re ready to ask students to think critically about the complex issues that copyright law raises, you’ll find ideas on these sites. Some are meant to provide background for you, the teacher, while others are appropriate for sharing in the classroom.

The role of “fair use” in a time of CHANGE, a 2009 lecture by Lawrence Lessig, raises intriguing questions about the way copyright works for print-based texts versus video-based texts and introduces the idea of Creative Commons as an alternative. The video is 66 minutes long, so you may want to ask students to view it outside of class and save class time for discussion.

Copyright: The Elephant in the Middle of the Glee Club, from the blog Balkinization, points out the glaring problems with the instruction at William McKinley High School on the television show Glee. There’s lots of fun and songs, but also a lot of apparently teacher-sanctioned copyright violation. The article will lead to lively discussion among students who watch the Fox TV show.

The Inbox Blog post Mixing or Plagiarizing? raises questions about how print-based text was recently borrowed in a German novel that the author defends as a cultural remix. Students can read the related news articles and discuss whether the copying was fair use or a violation of the original writer's copyright.

Challenging a YouTube Video Take Down is a short, and likely memorable, introduction to the fair use in using video clips to create a new work. Classroom discussion might focus on how the principles of fair use apply in other contexts. Students might also search other sites to learn how to protest a take down on another website.

Can You Copyright Your Tweets? refutes the position that Twitter posts are too short to be protected by copyright. The post comes from the blog 95Years, recommended by @jensmyth. Check the blog for the latest controversies involving technology and social media. Because some information on the site is not appropriate for your typical classroom, the resource is best for teachers rather than students.

The xkcd comic “Steal This Comic” is a short, pointed discussion starter for the issues surrounding music copyright. Whether you agree with xkcd’s take on the issue or not, it’s an interesting way to introduce the topic.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo of copyright symbol by Horia Varlan]

A Writer's Work Is Never Finished

Last week I saw one of our school’s counselors headed down the hallway with a cash box in hand. Under the very serious pressure of budget cuts in our district, I used my standard coping mechanism—bad attempts at humor—and asked her if she was taking it upon herself to start collecting money directly from students. She assured me that her task was of a more official sort. She was collecting deposits for an early May ritual in many American high schools: the College Board’s Advanced Placement Exams.

I was immediately flooded with memories of my experiences as an AP Literature teacher. First among them, given the counselor’s activity that brought AP to mind, were instances of the awkward conversations around the “Should I? or Shouldn’t I?” question with borderline students from families without much expendable income. As much as I enjoyed and learned from my years teaching AP English, I was aware even then of some of the program’s inherent tensions and shortcomings, many of which are now thoughtfully debated in NCTE’s new edited volume College Credit for Writing in High School: The “Taking Care of” Business.

Awkwardness around individual students seeking advice on whether to pay to take the exam are, of course, overshadowed by the broader limitations of the Advanced Placement program. These include the focus on timed, unrevised writing; the privileging of “correct” interpretation; and the difficulty of integrating authentic research writing into a year crammed with response to literature. Even more problematic, though, is the idea that for some students who score well enough on the exam, the class might be the last they would take that would treat writing instruction as one of its main aims.

In an ideal world, we could rest assured that students are being challenged and supported as thinkers and writers in every course, in every discipline, at every level. Knowing we’re not in that ideal world, I suppose we’ll always be left with that uncomfortable feeling of students being “finished” with writing instruction, whether that terminal point is a 3 (or a 5) on an AP English class, or an A (or a C) in a required freshman rhetoric course.

I always tried to address that tension in a well-intentioned but likely ineffective way in the last days of my AP English classes. As students shared their plans for summer and fall, I would dispense sage advice about college, emphasizing that regardless of their scores on the exam, they should take every opportunity to enroll in courses that would ask them to read and write in ways that challenged them and made them better thinkers. We know writers are never “finished” developing, and any aspect of the educational system that suggests otherwise—whether it’s in the high schools or colleges and universities, the assessment industry or published programs of study—isn’t going to feel right to us.

Recognizing that each of us plays an important role in developing our students’ abilities and attitudes as writers, it’s crucial to heed this advice from NCTE’s Beliefs about the Teaching of Writing: “learning to teach well is a lifetime process, and lifetime professional development is the key to successful practice. Students deserve no less.” The better we are at supporting our writers, which includes fostering their understanding that there is more to learn no matter what a test or a transcript tells them, the better off they’ll be.

Deep Curriculum for All

As a young teacher, I taught in a high school that separated students into five different tracks at each grade level. Students in each of those tracks were supposed to receive a certain sort of education. As you might imagine, the lower track expectation was for lower level curricula of the sort described in the example in Kylene Beers’ The Genteel Unteaching of America's Poor. I, though, was naïve and new as a teacher, and it never occurred to me to dumb down learning in my classroom or to shield certain of my students from particular kinds of learning opportunities. Thank goodness for newness and naivety!

I thought back to my high school teaching days yesterday when Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews and Newsweek released “The Top of the Class” (Newsweek, June 8, 2009). The report names the most successful high schools in the nation measured by adding the total number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests taken by all students at the school in May and dividing the result by the number of seniors graduating in May or June. 1500 American public high schools have made the grade of 1.000 or higher.

In his column "Is AP for All A Formula For Failure?" (The Washington Post, June 8, 2009), Matthews argues that all students should take AP classes and he points to one or two schools that have had success with this. The Newsweek list points to more successful schools. It seems, according to #5 on the FAQ for the Newsweek list, that the higher ranked schools do offer more students challenging curriculum along with those tests.

Today, as I thought about the high school rankings, Education Week released its annual Diploma Counts report. Today, in America, only 7 of 10 students graduate from high school in four years (a statistic which some consider to underestimate the numbers of dropouts). In fact, in 2006 (the latest available data from the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center) only 69.2% o American students graduated from high school. That was an increase of 2.8% over the 1996 graduation rate—not so good in my estimation. I can’t help but think that some of those who don’t graduate drop out because they are not drawn into a challenging curriculum. And we can change that.

What if we take Matthews’ argument and translate AP and IB into “challenging 21st century curriculum” as NCTE defines it in the NCTE Framework for 21st Century Curriculum and Assessment? Can we increase the numbers of high school graduates and the numbers of schools that rank at the top because their students are successful with challenging curriculum? I think so.

So What Is 21st Century Learning Anyhow?

None of us has escaped the technological and media explosion of the 21st Century but most all of us need ways of working to use the new tools of our world to help prepare our students for the now and the later.

The NCTE Definition of 21st Century Literacies and the just-released NCTE Framework for 21st Century Curriculum and Assessment give teachers ways “to think about their practice and how it relates to 21st century learning,” as Bill Bass notes. See Bill’s complete explanation on his blog . Franki Sibberson, Bill’s Executive Committee colleague, adds to his comments on her blog.

But a picture is worth the proverbial 1000 words. See YouTube video The Networked Student on Alec Curos’ blog . The video was inspired by CCK08, a Connectivism course offered by George Siemens and Stephen Downes during fall 2008 and depicts an actual project completed by Wendy Drexler’s high school students. The Networked Student concept map was inspired by Alec Couros’ Networked Teacher.