After critiquing the two copyright resources I visited for this blog post this week I have come to the conclusion that copyright can be a very blurred concept. I believe this because I don’t think everyone is properly educated on what is/isn’t against copyright laws. Within my time here at Rutgers I have been educated heavily on plagiarizing whether it be for someone else’s work or properly citing text from an author. However, I have not heard once about copyright until this blog post. In my first year of the graduate school I was assigned various projects where I had to create multimedia projects. For one of my projects the document was removed from YouTube because it stated that it dishonored one of the copyright laws. I was astonished when this happened because I was not aware of what I did wrong and thought that because I cited the audio that I used in my project it was okay. Since copyright laws are not regularly addressed I find that people tend to think of them in less of a mandated order. It is important when being an educator to address these concerns to your students so they are well advanced and clearly understand what is, and what is not, against copyright laws. In today’s educational world technology has become such an essential piece in children’s education that it is imperative for them to be educated on these topics. When students and educators are educated on these different laws it will not only make their workload easier but also may cause less frustration later on. The first resource I viewed was, "YouTube Copyright Basics" by YouTube Help, the following excerpt is my critique on this resource.
With this resource I really enjoyed how the concepts of
copyright and everything there is to learn about the topic were explained
simply for viewers to be able to understand at all age levels. However, I did
not like the characters that were used and the way they communicated amongst
one another. I think that the way the actors/delivers of information presented
the material made it seem like the video was meant for a much younger age
level. However, the way the information was presented and thoroughly explained
made me like watching this video and be able to effectively learn about the different
concepts regarding copyright. A nice feature of this video was the humor that
was implemented to address different conflicts that are involved when
copyrighting. I think this was helpful for keeping the interest of all the
viewers of the video to be able to know the different precautions when using
other user’s videos on YouTube. Overall I found this video to be very
informative on copyright and all the issues users and producers run into while
utilizing videos from across the YouTube platform.
I really enjoyed viewing this text-based resource because it
implements a way to be able to educate your students and yourself of the
important concepts of copyright. Although copyright made be a challenging
concept to understand when it is delivered through a unit it can be helpful for
not only students but also teachers as well. I like that it incorporates
different instances that might have occurred and then educates the viewer on
these topics. One of the topics states, “Have you ever…” this is a very quick
and useful way to notice if you have performed any of these acts before and
then be able to learn whether or not this may violate the copyright laws. This
website does a great job of walking through all the common mistakes and then
helping you to understand whether or not this is a flaw and going over the basics
for copyright. However, something that I did not like about this informational
resource was how text-heavy it is and the lack of multimedia aids for further
explanations. I think for different users the use of multimedia within this
resource could be very essential. Overall, I found this resource to be a very
good place to go and navigate various information regarding copyright, however,
I think it is targeted towards a higher age level since it contains a lot of
text.
http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/curr280.shtml
References
Starr, L., & Education World. (2010, March 25). The Educator's Guide to Copyright and Fair Use. Retrieved March 17, 2017, from http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/curr280.shtml
YouTubeHelp. (2013, July 01). Retrieved March 17, 2017, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cp1Jn4Q0j6E&list=PLvzOwE5lWqhTbOCIFp_OxsN6nC-l20kMT&index=3
