A grey and contested area!

I’ve recently sought advice from a couple of fellow media educators regarding the legality of posting copyrighted audio and video material to sites on the internet such as YouTube, TeacherTube and blogs.

The first to reply was the Chief Examiner of A level Media Studies for a leading English awarding body and Head of Media Studies at a sixth form college widely regarded as a centre of excellence for the subject. As the Media Studies department at the college in question has posted a lot of copyrighted material on their website over the years, I wondered what their position on this issue was. Here is the reply I received:

It does infringe copyright, but in practice the worst that is likely to
happen is someone notifies YouTube and they shut down your account.

We have never had a problem with using music (e.g. for music video made
by kids) and as far as I am aware no-one has ever been prosecuted here
or in the US for it. Uploading clips you have ripped from DVD again is
unlikely to result in a problem, but as we discovered this year, can
result in your account being shut down; ours went when the BPI objected
to a clip ripped from the Brit awards programme which we had uploaded.
We had to start again from scratch and re-upload all videos.

My advice would be to carry on with kids’ work, but don’t use the same
account if you upload something you have ripped from elsewhere!

Further advice from a University lecturer in Media studies was as follows:

This is a grey and contested area and I am not a media lawyer (I would have a much bigger house and a car that is not literally falling to bits) so this is conjecture and not binding legal advice…

Having said all that, copyright law recognises a degree of educational purpose across the range of printed and media material. A number of sites have explanations for staff and students on this. I think that this is the statute that (the practitioner above) quotes and goes by:

“Sound and videorecordings and broadcasts may be copied for the making of a film or film sound-track by students and/or academic staff involved in the course of instruction, or of preparation for instruction, in the making of films or film sound-tracks. Note, this copying may only be done by the tutor(s) or the student(s) involved in the course.”

This quote is from Staffordshire University’s exhaustive library pages at http://www.staffs.ac.uk/legal/copyright/

educational_purposes/

This does not cover the uploading of any created, repurposed material to the web. On the other hand you are not exactly selling it on by displaying it for students to critique (or whatever). The case for educational use is usually made on the grounds of not-for-profit or resale and academic purposes only. So long as the college would not be compiling them and selling them on as a DVD (which would be a cast iron case for prosecution I reckon) then posting them for a while on your site ought to be OK.  If push comes to shove and an agent of whatever film company spots re-used copyright material, the usual recourse is to a letter or other communication requiring the removal of the material. So long as you have maintained control over that material and you can take it down if you need to, I think you would be covered. If you left it there, you might be sued!  As far as I know, (the practitioner above) retains control of the postings and could remove them.  I’m unaware of him ever having any difficulty with this.

Materials made available to you through the Creative Archive (BBC, Channel 4 etc) are explicitly available for use in the special Creative Archive agreement which can be found here: http://www.teachers.tv/creativearchive

BECTA has some further sorces of info here http://schools.becta.org.uk/index.php?section=is&catcode=ss_to_es_pp_le_03&rid=14159

So there we have it. A grey and contested area indeed!

Fair Use?

Having just posted a short clip from BBC Newsround on TeacherTube (http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=3462e4ad1919e70ba11f), I’m aware that it may well be taken down if it is felt to be infringing copyright. This throws the whole issue of how practical the internet is for sharing content with students into question; teachers simply don’t have time to get permission for every little thing they post and I understand that many use the concept of “fair use” in their defence. I need to find out more about this.

From YouTube to TeacherTube

Previously unable to post either audio or video files to my Moodle pages due to Local Education Authority web filtering, I seem to have found an initial solution via Teacher Tube, which isn’t blocked. I have created an account at Teacher Tube (www.teachertube.com) and can upload both audio and video files which I create using Windows Movie Maker. I can then create links in Moodle to the relevant pages on Teacher Tube. Here’s a link to the first audio file I uploaded: http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=58b27dab4b7c92e7d16d

Moodling Along

I’ve continued to use Moodle with my A2 Media Studies group over the past few weeks.

Inivitably, I suppose, on enrolling for this course, two of the boys decided to change their user picture from the default smiley face to something more personal/silly; a rather large girl in one case, and a black gangster figure in the other (see moodle-assignment-responses). As mildly irritating as this was at first, I decided to let it go, recognising that many people, not just teenagers, like to personalise and lighten up their work space.

Deadlines for submission of work have been met more regularly in most cases. Potential for the peer group to see who has and who hasn’t handed in work displayed on the whiteboard at the start of lessons may have played a part in this (see who stands out like a sore thumb in the Goldfinger Assignment Responses: link above).

Although internet filtering prevents me from linking to YouTube videos from school, I’ve been told that material hosted on TeacherTube will be accessible. Of course, there’s only one way to find out…

First Moodle Page!

moodle-a2-media-studies-home-page

Moodle, WordPress and Blackboard

The following results from a Moodle case study by Educause make interesting reading:  

• Students recommend use of Moodle in future classes (74% agree or strongly agree)
• Students recommend use of blogs in future classes (51% agree or strongly agree)
• Ease of interface navigation: Moodle easier to navigate than WordPress.com
• Students responses to Moodle (majority recommend its use in future and feel they benefited from it)
• Students slightly prefer Moodle over Blackboard
• Students find many Moodle features helpful

Maybe I’m not on such a bad track after all.

 

Moodle Poodle?

Much as I’d love to have complete freedom to choose which social software to use with my students, I’ve decided to go with Moodle for the moment, largely because it’s already being used by several colleagues and seems to be the way the wind is blowing in my institution i.e. management fully supports its use, unlike many of the other more exciting looking web tools I’ve come across on my MA course so far.

Actually, having had a closer look at it over the weekend, it doesn’t seem that bad. I found a useful guide for beginners and some course design tips to get me started and now have an account on the school’s server which is accessible from home. So let’s Moodle! 

Why We (Sometimes Don’t) Blog

It’s been nearly two weeks since my last post here, so what’s my excuse, and why, strangely, do I feel I need one?

As a state secondary school teacher, my students and I are still very much tied to the old world of paper exams, whose high season is now. As long as students’ future education opportunities and my level of pay depend on the outcome of such exams, they will continue to push more reflective activities to the margins.

But why do I feel the need to explain this? Perhaps because the public nature of blogging seems to generate a sense of duty and obligation towards one’s potential audience, however small one’s “stats” show it to be.

In Why We Blog by Bonnie Nardi et al. (http://darrouzet-nardi.net/bonnie/pdf/Nardi_why_we_blog.pdf), the sense of an audience is clearly central to the motivation of bloggers within each of the five (“not exhaustive” and “by no means mutually exclusive”) categories that they discovered in their research (otherwise, why not just write a private journal?). As “one of those people for whom writing and thinking are basically synonymous”, I strongly identify with those bloggers quoted in the “Blog As Muse” section of the article. To acknowledge an audience’s ability “to shape the writing” is, more importantly, to acknowledge their ability to shape the thinking, or, as Will Richardson puts it, “push my thinking further” (see earlier post: http://muso1.wordpress.com/2008/05/11/from-journaling-to-blogging/). For this reason alone, I can see myself blogging in one form or another in the future. 

Educational Blocking

This week I’ve had to read and reflect on the following two articles for my MA course:

Blogging to Learn by Anne Bartlett-Bragg (http://knowledgetree.flexiblelearning.net.au

/edition04/pdf/Blogging_to_Learn.pdf)

Educational Blogging by Stephen Downes (http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM0450.pdf).

Bartlett-Bragg’s presentation of her 5-Stage Blogging Process as something that has “been informed and developed from practice and not theory” seems to provide the sort of encouragement educators need to embrace blogs within (their) pedagogical practices” without waiting over-cautiously for some kind of foolproof “Idiot’s Guide” to come along which will have done all the thinking and risk-taking for them. It seems clear that we must resist the temptation to keep “getting ready” and just “get going”, however “swamped” we may feel by the often confusing mass of “new technology options” which are now becoming available to us. If we are to successfully encourage students to “shift from surface to deeper levels of learning”, we must surely lead by example and model what it means to be “active individuals, wholly present, engaging with others, and open to challenge”. I only hope, whilst “walking across the desert”, that we are able to discriminate between truly nourishing oases and the many time-wasting, strength-sapping mirages.

Despite his obvious enthusiasm for educational blogging, Downes rightly points to a key “dilemma for educators”, namely, the problem of how to encourage “free-flowing”, “unconstrained”, “authentic”, “reflective” and “engaged” intellectual conversation within institutional contexts which necessarily involve prescription, monitoring, censorship and grading. How, for instance, are we to enable the sort of “quality linking” essential to this “new realm of human communication” if access to Web 2.0 sites – such as YouTube – and any sites with the word “blog” in the address is blocked, as in my own Local Education Authority? If blogging is, as Ken Smith claims, “writing down what you think when you read others” and having others “write down what they think when they read you”, such restricted access can only weaken the potential of educational blogging to motivate and engage our students in their own learning process.

Pay Attention

Here’s another challenging video for educators.

But perhaps this is who we should be listening to more than anyone else; the students themselves: