Instructify

BY KEVIN HODGSON

You have work past the crackle, static, and white noise of the recordings, but RadioLovers is a website that has archived old radio shows from the pre-television days. Bob Hope, Groucho Marx, and Laurel and Hardy are just a few among the classic voices kept alive at this site, which features free downloads of the files in MP3 format. RadioLovers features comedies, mysteries, science fiction, and even music programs.

If you are doing a unit around media literacy, this site might even be helpful in showing how entertainment has often been commercialized. Listen to the openings of some of these programs and you realize that the first few minutes are often used to showcase the show’s sponsors. You could easily draw some parallels to the use of product placement in various movies and television shows these days.

For students interested in podcasting, these old radio shows are valuable for learning about pacing of story, voice inflection, and the use of sound effects (which is not often a topic covered in a traditional writing class, is it?)

On the issue of copyrights, the site discloses that it believes the radio shows are now in the public domain and no longer protected. Whether that would hold up in a court of law remains to be seen (or not). Even so, these files give a glimpse of entertainment from times when writing, sound effects, and voice were the prevailing means for delivering a stories to a large audience.

RadioLovers

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BY BILL FERRIS

If you ask nicely (and if you’re a teacher or librarian), science-fiction author Cory Doctorow will send you a free copy of With a Little Help, his new collection of short stories.

If you’re not familiar with his work, Doctorow is an editor of Boing Boing, as well as a thought leader on copyright reform and Creative Commons — for years he’s licensed his books under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license, meaning you can freely download, remix, share, and adapt his books as much as you want on a noncommercial basis.

Since so many teachers sweat copyright issues in the classroom, you may want to start with Doctorow’s Content (also available for free via Creative Commons), his in-depth look at his thoughts on copyright in the 21st century.

Get a free copy (libraries, schools)

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Images — so useful in education, yet so convoluted in copyright explanations that many people fear using them. But if you wade into the waters of Creative Commons you can find millions of available images, ready to be used, modified, and shared. One of the more common image sites is Flickr, which we have highlighted a few times. Here at Instructify, we’ve talked about creative commons laws, and we’ve given you several ways to search Flickr using third party search engines like FlickrCC and Flickrstorm, but there is another way that deserves mention for their combination of the two.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Many educators simply don’t use copyrighted material in class rather than risking a cease-and-desist letter or wading through a bunch of legal mumbo jumbo. Copyright is one of those areas that needs a handy reference or checklist of some sort.

The Free Technology for Teachers blog reports that such a checklist exists, courtesy of the folks behind the California Student Media Festival:

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BY BILL FERRIS

Pics4Learning is another handy resource for teachers who need images to use in class that: 1) look cool, and 2) won’t get them in trouble for copyright violations. According to the Pics4Learning site, “Unlike many Internet sites, permission has been granted for teachers and students to use all of the images donated to the Pics4Learning collection.” No fuss, no muss, and most importantly, no cease-and-desist letters from angry copyright holders.

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BY BILL FERRIS

It’s hard to believe that Google figured out how to search for my house from space before getting around to searching for photos licensed under Creative Commons¹. According to the Google Operating System blog (not affiliated with Google), Google Image Search now lets you narrow your results to pics that carry the Creative Commons license. Hey, better late than never.

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What good is a free photo editor if you don’t know which images you can manipulate with it? With all this fancy-schmancy technology available to students for free, they also need to learn about copyright. At Teaching Copyright, they aim to show students how to legally take full advantage of the media available to students today.

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Hello and greetings once again from my undisclosed, fortified location. As will happen from time to time, I started to feel the authorities closing in all around me. Men sporting both mustaches and sunglasses would stare at me for much longer than usual, ATMs would reject my cards, small electronic devices kept showing up in my apartment — I was getting the fear. Once again, I was in the grips of paranoia and panic because of copyright worries.

Phony intrigue aside, that weird déjà vu feeling is bound to creep up on you when you’re selecting an image for use. Have I seen this McDonalds Golden Arches®™© symbol somewhere before?  TinEye reverse image search engine is a great tool to help you trace images back to their original source (and, in some cases, a higher resolution version that’s better than the one you started out with).

TinEye has plugins available for both Firefox and IE, as well as bookmarklets for other browsers, so you won’t need to keep returning to the main page to copy in a URL. That should save you a lot of time when you stumble across an image on the web.

Because TinEye is the first search engine to let you see how an image is being used by different users, you can really show students how images can evolve. This can effectively demonstrate the ideas of image accountability and integrity. Have your students search a somewhat notorious company’s logo, such as Enron, and see how it has been modified. That opens the door for  you to field questions about trademarked logos being used for satire and parody. Aren’t you glad that I’m providing you with more work now? — NICK YINGLING

TinEye

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What’s fair in fair use?

Grab photos for free at Compfight

You’ve probably heard a lot by now about using Creative Commons images, and how you shouldn’t use copyrighted material online, but sometimes this presents a great big brick wall to learning. Take a look at this photo. It’s a pretty famous picture. You can find it on Wikipedia, but if you look there you’ll see it’s a copyrighted photo. What’s the answer?

There’s a part of U.S. copyright law called fair use doctrine. The bad news is that it is vague, subject to judicial interpretation, and handled on a case-by-case basis. The good news is that there are parts of it that allow for educational or journalistic use. Here are some resources to help you with learning more about fair use.

Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Media Literacy Education | Media Education Lab is a project of Temple University’s School of  Communication and Theater. Kristen Hokanson does a lot of work with this group and maintains this Copyright Confusion Wiki.

Chilling Effects Clearinghouse is maintained by a number of law schools and is a site to get information about Fair Use.

Most of these sites use case studies (a favorite method in legal education), and provide guidelines rather than clear-cut answers. This quote from Hokanson sums up the situation, and why it’s that way:

It takes practice to gain confidence in applying the fair use reasoning process. There is no one “right” answer in making a fair use determination, which is why the courts have established a “reasonableness standard” which limits the liability of librarians or teachers who make a good-faith judgment that might be judged to be a violation of copyright. No one fair use checklist “fits” a particular case or situation. In some cases, a checklist can actually interfere with reasoning. A checklist can become a substitute or a short-cut for critical thinking. In thinking about fair use, each particular case must be critically examined through a reasoning process. SO if an educator goes through such a process to justify their use as fair use, it would be unlikely that that educator would “get into trouble” for copyright violation.

Hopefully this gives you the confidence to put these fair use guidelines to the test yourself! -ALICE MERCER

• More than words… | Reflections on Teaching
• Copyright Confusion  Wiki
• Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Media Literacy Education | Media Education Lab
• Chilling Effects Clearinghouse

Photo Credit: Photograph of Rosa Parks being fingerprinted by Deputy Sheriff D. H. Lackey during her indictment on charges of organizing a boycott. Montgomery, Alabama on February 22, 1956. Associated Press photo by Gene Harrick this images is used under the fair use provision of U.S. copyright law for educational purposes because of the unique historic nature of the subject and as an illustration of  fair use for educational purposes.

How can you legally use copyrighted material in your class? Or can you do it at all? What if a student turns in a project that a copyrighted photo, or a video with a copyrighted song as the soundtrack? Are you supposed to call the FBI?

Copyright is confusing. Fortunately, you can spare yourself the headaches by taking advantage of the smorgasbord of material that’s licensed for educational/not-for-profit use at Creative Commons. You can learn how to use this marvelous tool over at Drape’s Takes in the blog post, The Educator’s Guide to the Creative Commons. Tech curriculum specialist Darren Draper breaks down copyright rules, talks about the stuff available for use, and best of all, teaching your students how to use Creative Commons, too. This is an essential guide to navigating the ins and outs of copyright, and how you can put CC licensed material to use in your classroom. -BILL FERRIS

The Educator’s Guide to the Creative Commons

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Learn about copyright at the What is Fair Use? blog

Revisiting Fair Use

Copyright in education, part 1: Fair use

Copyright in education, part 2: Transformative use

Find a Smorgasbord of Free Photos at flickrCC

Sometimes it seems as though the main thing kids (and adults) need to learn about history is that it really happened, to real people, people not so different from us. Never in all of history has it been easier to make this point with primary sources, more of which go online every day. One recent historic addition to this global archive at our fingertips is the LIFE magazine photo collection, now on the web courtesy of Google.The front page of the LIFE photo archive gives some terrific introductory browses, by decade or by a few chosen topics. To search only the LIFE photos, you can visit this page or else enter “source:life” in a regular Google Images search. Perhaps best of all, all the pictures seem to be available in large, high-resolution versions, and all of them seem have useful information prominently displayed, such as the date the photograph was taken and the name of the photographer. It would have been nice if copyright information about the photos were as easy to find; under the current copyright laws, it is a fair use for educators to put any of these photos in classroom-only materials, but it’s not clear whether they can be reproduced on an open website or in a book, for instance.

One wonderful thing about the LIFE photos is that they’re works of art as well as of American history; the magazine’s photographers routinely collected entirely justified awards. Some of the gorgeous photos I found by browsing include a picture of a bare-chested Picasso with a flower behind his ear, a picture of children of Japanese ancestry on their way to a WWII internship camp, and a picture of famed socialite and photographer Lee Miller in full soldier kit sitting on a piece of rubble. But why not look around for yourself? A search is worth a thousand words. — AMANDA FRENCH

LIFE photo archive hosted by Google

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By now you’re surely familiar with Google Book Search, the project to digitize and display millions of books, which began in 2004. You’ve doubtless noticed that ordinary Google searches now turn up results from books, so that a student’s search for “Silas Marner” will point her not just to Wikipedia, but to the text and page images of the book itself on http://books.google.com. You may even have heard that Google recently settled a lawsuit brought by the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild over whether the search company had the right to scan in-copyright material and display parts of such material in search results.

It is our delightful task, however, to tell you about something we’re guessing you haven’t heard of: Google Book Search previews. You can now use Google Book Search’s “Preview Wizard” to generate a little virtual book that will fit in a small square of your web page or blog. All you need is the book’s ISBN number, access to your web site’s underlying code, and the courage to copy and paste snippets of JavaScript. (If you have a WordPress blog, use Design and Widgets to insert the code; if you have a Blogger.com blog, use Layout and Edit HTML.) By default, what appears is a picture of the book’s cover with clickable arrows that let you page back and forth in the book, though you might want to choose other display options. Some books will grant you access to the full text, while others will give you only a few pages or chapters, but in both cases this widget is a great way to encourage your screen-dazed students toward books.

It’s also worth noting that libraries, bookstores, and book-oriented sites are taking advantage of the same technology on a larger scale; Google Book Search previews are available from the websites of WorldCat, LibraryThing, GoodReads, Books-a-Million, and many more. Happy reading (online)! — AMANDA FRENCH

Google Book Search Preview Wizard

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It’s always nice to see a class assignment poke its nose outside the classroom and start sniffing the wind of the world outside. Blogs in particular seem to travel as easily in and out of a classroom as students and teachers do, and the “What is Fair Use?” blog is a good example. Peter Friedman, a law professor at Case Western University, began this copyright blog in February of 2008 for one of his law classes; he created and posted documents for a fake copyright lawsuit so that his students could argue both sides, and then posted relevant links, readings, mp3s, and videos. Friedman continued to add to the blog long after the end of that particular spring semester “In light of the timeliness and open-endedness of the issues raised by the fictional lawsuit.”

As of September 2008 Friedman has moved all his copyright blogging to “Ruling Imagination,” where he will continue commenting on copyright lawsuits as they occur. In a September 9th post, for instance, Friedman summarized and commented on the ruling against the “Harry Potter Lexicon,” a dictionary based on Rowling’s books which was found to be infringing, i.e., not a fair use of copyrighted material. Both blogs will doubtless be great resources for anyone who needs some specific examples of what is or is not fair use, especially for those who want it explained in clear but still decidedly lawyerly language. -AMANDA FRENCH

What is Fair Use?

Ruling Imagination

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Photo credit: tvol on flickr

I ran across a great example of fair use in education that I wanted to share because it teaches us a lot about one type of situation where you can use copyrighted photos, and illuminates the thought process/procedures for working out whether something is fair use and how to document it.

The Wikipedia entry on Anne Frank features the famous picture of her that we all know well.

When you are using photos from Wikipedia, it’s always a good idea to go to the image page. You get there by clicking on the picture. It will let you know what licensing the picture has, and how to credit it. You should always look at this page before you copy a picture from Wikipedia. The one for Anne Frank’s photo is interesting. Let’s take a look:

1. Now we see that photo is copyrighted but unlicensed. This means it’s not “registered” but that makes no difference about whether it is “protected”.
2. They are using it under Fair Use because no free equivalent is available, it shows the subject, and it’s being used for educational purposes.
3. Someone is telling the uploader (the person who put it up and wrote that rationale), that they did not put up enough information, and lists what is missing.

This illustrates what steps Wikipedia wants contributors to go through to document fair use, and is a good lesson in what you might want to do if you are making a fair use of copyrighted material on your Website at school. -ALICE MERCER

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Copyright in education, part 1: Fair use

Copyright in education, part 2: Transformative use

Being educators, we are often conservative, especially when it involves the law, as copyright does. This has led to a growing concern about missed learning opportunities due to caution because teachers are avoiding doing anything with copyrighted materials, or not allowing their students to produce content using copyrighted material.

American and Temple Universities have been working on this and have a report coming out about the cost of copyright confusion in education. I recently attended a session at NECC given by Kristen Hokanson on this topic. This discussion brought up a concept that is really central to educational use of copyrighted material, and that is transformation. A big part of what makes it fair use is that you’re not just “copying” the work of others, but remaking it into something of your own. One of the best examples is the Fair(y) Use Tale video produced by Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. This video takes snippets from Disney cartoons to teach about fair use. Because it’s both education AND satire, it’s covered by fair use.

I was first introduced to this concept when I did a case-study discussion (a favorite way for lawyers to discuss and educate about legal points) about a potential fair use I had in a classroom project. Transformation is not often discussed, but it’s an important concept for fair use.  Get to know more about it. -ALICE MERCER

Transformative use resources

Stanford University guide to Fair Use in Education check out the section on the “transformative factor”

Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society Fair(y) Use Tale

It’s Elementary: Copyright–It’s the Law

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Photo credit: PugnoM on flickr