Aug

28

shifting sands on copyright…

August 28, 2007 | Leave a Comment

I had the opportunity to have dinner this evening with Deneen Frazier Bowen – in town to kick off our district’s opening day PD – and Bryan Facey, our district’s Technology Supervisor. Of course, with the three of us at the table the conversation centered around what we all saw as the challenges and opportunities for learning with the digital generation.

The conversation eventually came around to the digital natives perceptions of copyright and intellectual property. Of course, today’s young people have a very different view of ownership when it comes to digital information, particularly web-based information. At the risk of generalizing, digital natives see anything web-based as “free” – of both cost and ownership. The lines for what is sharable and available for their personal use is far more blurry than our understandings.

Deneen made a couple of interesting points; the role that mashups are playing in blurring the lines between existing and new information and how kids voices are not being heard in the conversations that are redefining these understandings. What we see as cheating they may see as collaboration; and the only way to reach a common understanding on these issues is through conversations that include them.

Now I am not suggesting that we need to reign in the natives and their use of digital media, but I do think it is important that they at least be given an understanding that just because something is easy and free to use, there are still issues of ownership.

Our conversation reminded me of something that David Warlick suggested during his keynote at L&L21C2 a couple of weeks ago. His suggestion – that we highlight ideas of intellectual property by having our kids copyright and label their own digital productions. By having students recognize that they hold ownership to their own works, they will begin to recognize that all digital content has ownership attached – ownership that needs to be respected and acknowledged.

Technorati Tags: frazier bowen copyright whipple

Photo credit: copyright cushion; Originally uploaded by openDemocracy to flickr.com; creative commons licence

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