My muddiest
point video blog has to do with copyright violations and plagiarism. Just the other day I had a conversation with
a teacher that was telling me a story about a student in her class had
requested to do extra work in order to earn extra credit to bring her grades
up. The teacher gracefully said yes and
instructed the student to write an essay that consisted of approximately 500
words. The teacher stated that the
student is not a very good reader but can browse and research material on the
Internet quite well.
A couple of
days later, the student turned in her essay which was verbatim word for word on
an article about India. Now, faced with
a dilemma, the teacher had to decide whether to punish the student for
plagiarism or show her what she did wrong while at the same time explaining to
her what the consequences of plagiarism.
Having to make a tough decision, the teacher decided to point out to the
student what she did wrong and required her to watch videos on plagiarism. The area that is unclear here is; how do you
determine punishment on students in k-8 that
have not been taught what plagiarism is? Or, what if the student does know
about plagiarism but simply forgot to cite something?
I want to
move on and talk a little about copyright violations. While talking with this same teacher, we
started to discuss copyright laws and the use of copyright material. During our conversation, the teacher showed
me a series of pictures she had downloaded from the Internet. The teacher hangs these pictures in her
classroom for the visual learners and the majority of them were cited as to
where they were obtained from. Notice
that I said the majority of them were cited.
I asked the teacher why some of the pictures were not cited and she said
that not all the time she would do so simply because copyright laws and the
fair use act can perhaps be contradictory of each other. With current copyright laws in place, there
is also the fair use act that would allow for use of material without having to
obtain a license or permission mainly in not for profit organizations. But research concludes that fair use is
routinely described by courts and scholars as copyright law’s most troublesome
doctrine (Balganesh, 2012, p. 271).
The bottom
line here is what is the best approach to avoiding copyright violations and
plagiarism? Who will train the teachers
on the best practices for using material obtained from third-party sources? And finally, how do we know that freeware is
actually free? What are your thoughts on
this?
References
Balganesh, S. (2012). The normativity of copying in
copyright law. Duke Law Journal,
62(2),
203-284.
Craven, Brandi. "Copyrights." Letter to Isaac Pettway. 19 Nov.
2014. MS. Elementary School,
Birmingham, Alabama.
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