Copyright, Nettiquette, Fair Use, and Cyber-bullying

Copyright laws have many loopholes.  I was vaguely aware of this fact throughout high school and my first two years of college.  After reading up on information over various copyright acts some of my questions have been cleared up.  However, it is clear that the situation is entirely subjective when it comes to a lawsuit.  Sometimes one side has the advantage without doubt, and other times the verdict is convoluted with particulars. An occasional reminder that manners are just as important on the internet as they are in person will do a lot of good for both teachers and students.  We need to be careful what we share with others or what we say, and think about how it affects those around us.  Cyber bullying is a cruel technique that intends to inflict harm on another person through a medium like the internet.  One element of cyber bullying I learned today is known as “happy slapping.” Apparently this is when kids assault unsuspecting people in public while recording the incident as evidence of their crime.  Then they share the video or photos with friends as if it’s entertainment.

  I am glad that we went over this information this week.  If my teachers in high school had elaborated and shared more information on what copyright laws were, I would feel better about the many papers I’ve since written.  I want to make the Fair Use Policy clear to my students.  My goal is to teach them life skills that will really help them in the “real world.” If all I do is teach them grammar or what limericks are then they won’t care about my class.  I want students to have marketable skills and realize how important literacy is.  Part of that goal involves teaching them how to share information legally and differentiating between what behaviors are appropriate and which are inappropriate. I felt such a gap between high school and college, and I don’t want that to happen to future generations.  There should be more of a cushion to support them during such a challenging time in their lives.  I still have some reading to do on the subject of copyrights, and the laws will keep changing. It’s up to each individual to decipher what behaviors are proper and prevent cyber bullying.

References

http://www.bullying.co.uk/cyberbullying/what-to-do-if-you-ve-been-happy-slapped/

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=happy+slapping

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/

  

Information Literacy and MAPping

Opening my browser window I click in the search box in the top right hand corner. I type my search information, and then I scroll through the links that appear after a few seconds.  This is how I usually perform an internet search.  Though it’s easier to just use the AVG search engine provided by my antivirus protection, I also prefer to use Bing.com to search topics.  Usually my searches are for trivial things like “Does Jack Black wear glasses?” I searched for this information earlier today through Safari on my iPhone.  I merely typed “Jack Black” and then went through images of the actor.  (No, the only picture I saw of him wearing glasses was where he wore sunshades.) I can find this sort of information rapidly, and I haven’t had much need for an in-depth internet search until school started up a few weeks ago.  I was not aware before I took the tech-savvy quiz of how much I didn’t know.  I knew that I was not a computer whiz, but I know enough to survive the day-to-day problems.  Some things that I discovered just today was that “.com” does not stand for “computer” as I always assumed: it stands for "company".  Neither does “.net” stand for “internet” but rather it stands for “networks.”  There were also many other endings to pages that I didn’t even know existed or never paid attention to before.  I took note of them and I plan to make use of this information in the future. 

My habits of internet searching will take a while to change.  I have done searches many times before, several times a day.  Unless I need to specifically find information from educational sites outside the U.S., I will have to search for the notes I took and use the proper “host:ac.za” or whatever other specific search requirements.   This knowledge will affect my teaching because when I do utilize the country codes (such as .za) I will be able to find specific information so much easier.  Finding sources for papers I want the students to write and finding information for my own needs will be much faster.  Why didn’t I learn about this in high school when I was forced to take a keyboarding class and a BCIS course? I still don’t know what BCIS stands for! I certainly hope that future students will be affected in a positive way by my knowledge of how to conduct a proper internet search.  It will help them when I am well prepared to teach.

Although there’s nothing wrong with the way that I usually search for information on the internet, it is very time consuming and sometimes counterproductive.  I chose to perform the assigned activities with the “Victorian Robots” link.  Yes, I partly chose it because my name was in the link. Anyway, I found out that there are many search engines I didn’t know about! Not only that, but once I used those engines I discovered that one of the links from http://bigredhair.com/robots/index.html led to another link that took me right back to the homepage.  Did the author of the robots page cite a link that just led back to itself? Or was it intended to promote the webpage? This information, along with some other information I found when I searched for “Victorian robots” led me to distrust the webpage.  Did those robots ever exist or are they urban legends? I was already skeptical in the first place and when I used the information from this class I discovered that I need to read more carefully into the websites I come across.  If most people were more “information literate” and had the ability to read critically, we may all be better off.

References

Guinan, P. (2001). Mechanical Marvels of the Nineteenth Century. [Web. 2011]. Retrieved from http://www.bigredhair.com/robots/index.html

USA TODAY (2008) Web Guide;  Robots in the Victorian Era. [Web post]. Retrieved September 18, 2013, from http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/webguide/hotsites/2003/2003-11-10-hotsites.htm

Greetings to all who find this! My name is Victoria Watts and I am a student/aspiring English teacher.  I have always enjoyed writing, though most of my work never leaves my journals or One Note computer program. Unfortunately that's a great way to ensure my work never receives constructive criticism or that my talent develops further. I live in a small town in Texas where the pine trees grow like a plague. It is unsettling to think that when most people think of Texas they envision the dusty old west with tumbleweeds and cowboys.  Part of my mission in life is to prove them wrong. Besides classes and working, I spend my time trying to ride the unicycle I received for Christmas a few years ago. Uni-cycling is a challenging sport that requires more of its rider once one task has finally been achieved.
I can see technology integrated in the classroom through several different avenues.  If computers are accessible to the class the students could keep their own blogs. I would take this opportunity because I feel that self-expression and emotion are key elements in creative writing.  I want students to feel like they have an outlet that only they share with me.  They can discuss story ideas, assignments, and reach out to me through this context.  The internet could be used in class to show videos or clips from movies that are based on books.  Videos could help students visualize the scenes in a text. When a student can see the setting for a scene in a book it can explain the actions of the characters.
My goals for this ETEC course involve learning marketable skills that can be used in the future when I am a teacher with a real classroom.  I want to be able to focus on the lessons and take as much away from them as I can.  Now that I have come this far in my education my classes are much more important.  Instead of taking the core curriculum I am taking specialized courses designed for my specific major. The information provided in these classes is what I will take with me to work as a teacher. It is up to me alone to remember what I am taught and apply it in practice later. Hopefully I will learn the tried-and-true, newest, and most effective techniques for teaching in this ETEC class. I want to learn how to be a great teacher, one who my students can depend on, trust, and most importantly I want to be a teacher from whom my students can learn something of value. My goal is to provide them with information they will use after they graduate and good memories of their high school career. Hopefully this course can provide me with skills to reach my students in a new way that they will accept.
Thanks for reading! Until next time, this is Tori, signing off.