All teachers are learners - All learners are teachers

Last night I made time to attend the weekly oz/nz educators flash meeting. This is a fantastic meeting where educators meet to discuss elearning issues, innovations and developments. Last nights meeting was hosted by Chris Betcher of http://betch.edublogs.org/ and centered around the discussion of copyright and interactive whiteboards. In my new role I will be posting more about IWB’s so I thought I would focus this post on copyright. If you are wanting to revisit the meeting from last night you can view the replay here .

In regards to copyright the discussion centered around the lack of information regarding what students can use and cannot use in their work. Jo McLeay cited a video on youtube which looks at copyright with Disney .

Educators spoke about how they were increasingly encouraging students to make use of creative commons work through sites such as flickr. The discussion went on to remind educators of the importance of attributing work from creative commons and cited John Connell’s blog in the UK as an example of the consequences of not attributing CC work. I spoke about how at Caroline Springs we try to get students to create as much content as possible through the use of camera, illustrator and garageband and then for students to CC their work and push their work up for the global society instead of always pulling information down.

So where to from here???? This topic made me think and I went back to school to search for policies in regards to attribution of Creative Commons work and I couldn’t find any. Once again I found that disparity with my own practice with my student mentors and the greater practice of the school. I then started to look for definitive information that we could implement in regards to the appropriate way of attributing creative commons work. Well let me tell you it was quite a search but alas I found answers.

I came across http://www.smartcopying.edu.au/ which is currently under development by the Copyright Advisory Group (CAG), a committee of the Schools Resourcing Taskforce (SRT) of the Australian Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA). The completed site, scheduled to be available in late 2008, will provide a comprehensive guide to copyright issues affecting Australian Schools. On this site there is a wealth of information for schools looking to guide them in regards to copyright issues. Of particular interest to me was the information sheet which looked at resources for schools in regards to creative commons licensing. This sheet became my mini bible for the day as it gave specific examples on how to attribute work licensed under creative commons and gave a great list of websites where such work can be found and used by students.

I am interested in hearing from others on what policies they have in their schools in regards to copyright and attribution. I have only touched the side of the iceberg in this post as I need to further think about the issue myself and would love further food for thought. If you are new to creative commons I have posted a video below which explains creative commons in their own words.