By Last weekend, Home Inc, put on a vibrant, thought-provoking conference here at MIT. Project NML was represented in two sessions. Erin and I presented about appropriation and using remixes in the classroom. Jenna McWilliams, former NML curriculum specialist and current Phd candidate at Indiana University, presented about the participatory assessment model she is working on with Dan Hickey using examples from the Teachers Strategy Guide: Reading in a Participatory Culture. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to see any of the other workshop presenters, but I heard there were some very interactive and inspiring sessions. I'll have a Part Two post about our NML sessions up soon and hopefully a link to videos from the conference!
Before discussing the workshops, I wanted to write about an overarching issue that came up throughout the conference. As the day progressed, we began to notice through corridor chatter and tweets (check out #homeinc on Twiter for the threads from the conference) that copyright/fair use confusion was becoming a trend. None of the sessions were explicitly about copyright, but a pattern emerged in many of the sessions where someone would raise a copyright issue or ask a fair use question, others would offer resources or their perspective, and debate would ensue because of the many different understandings of copyright/fair use law.
When Erin and I encountered this in our session, it made sense because we were suggesting educators not only show pop culture remixes in the classroom, but also have their students think critically about media and remix it themselves. While it might not be such a big deal for students to remix copyrighted material that stayed within the school walls, Web 2.0 has increased the possibilities to distribute student-produced media outside of the classroom. Our workshop attendees asked us about their and their students' rights in terms of downloading copyrighted content, as well as what was allowed if they wanted to upload it to the web.
In the development of the Learning Library, NML recognized the widespread confusion about copyright and fair use. We built challenges to help users better understand these issues and made them required in hopes that users would keep them in mind when they were adding content to the Learning Library. These challenges "Mannie Garcia and Copyright," "Shepard Fairey and Fair Use," and "Optimus Prime and Creative Commons" allow users to think through real-world cases of copyright confusion. They are a great starting point for both teachers and students to understand what's going on with copyright today. You can access these challenges and the rest of the Learning Library here.
The copyright conversations at the conference also sparked the creation of the following list of resources on copyright and fair use for educators and students. (There resources, along with many others from the conference, are listed on a wiki created by conference attendees)
- The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education and Fair Use and Online Video - Center for Social Media
- Creative Commons videos
- CCMixter: a site to get creative commons licensed music that you can use on your videos:
- Copyleft (making materials available in public domain), in the opinion of Free Software guru Richard Stallman
- Bound by Law - fair use graphic novel from Duke Law
- "Fair Use and Transformativeness" by Joyce Valenza
We'd love to hear how you deal with copyright/fair use issues in your school or classroom. Also if you have any other resources you like to use, please let us know!
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