Fair Use?

What's fair?  As teachers, we may try to instill in our students what is fair isn't always equal, but what is needed to make each person successful.   I think we can stretch this to fair use for copyrighted materials... what we think as educators is fair, may not be appropriate use of copyrighted information.  In fact, I think that educators are the worst offenders of copyright infringement and plagiarism under the guise of using resources for educational purposes.

We may know that we need to educate and lead by example, but modeling ethical behaviors with handouts and online resources isn't always easy.  In order for our students to better understand citing resources and respecting others' work, we must always include it in our own teaching!  When using Internet resources in lessons, it is always important to verbalize the source and provide written documentation of the source as a visualization.  This can also be a part of using PowerPoint, videos, and other documents.  Students have to see it in action to understand it needs to be a part of their own writing and reporting.

Citations and plagiarism and 'character' go hand in hand... in hand.  With the Internet I can understand how "students tend to believe the information available on the Internet is freely available for any use." (Pearson, P. 136)  When it comes down to it, students need to learn how to respect information that is not their own, just as we teach them character values about respecting people and property.  Fair use may have shifting guidelines with changing technology, but we have to continue modeling and teaching appropriate uses of resources.

 

 

A great collection of resources for anti-plagiarism can be found at http://www.djusd.k12.ca.us/harper/jboston/PlagiarismResources.htm