Our friend and colleague, Chris Sloan, from the Wasatch Range Writing Project in Utah invited Renee Hobbs and Troy Hicks to join us on this week’s Teachers Teaching Teachers. (By the way, if you would like to plan and produce (and later edit) a TTT webcast like Chris did for this episode, please email Paul Allison or Susan Ettenheim.)

Here’s how Chris Sloan describes his thinking for the live webcast:

The authors of “Code of Practices for Fair Use in Media Education” might just as well be describing me, when they write, “Most ‘copyright education’ that educators and learners have encountered has been shaped by the concerns of commercial copyright holders, whose understandable concern about large-scale copyright piracy has caused them to equate any unlicensed use of copyrighted material with stealing.”  While the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education was published more than a year ago, I still have questions about how it applies to my own teaching and to my students’ digital compositions.  And I don’t think I’m alone either.  So I thought having a chat with Renee Hobbs and Troy Hicks, two people who’ve thought a lot about this, might help me (and other teachers like me) think through the copyright doctrine of fair use.

We asked Renee to talk about her background, how she got to this place where she is, a media educator at Temple University.  In November 2008, educators were introduced to the “Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education, by Renee Hobbs, Peter Jaszi, and Patricia Auferheide.  We also asked her how and why the three of them created this code? Troy Hicks wrote a book The Digital Writing Workshop and an article “Transforming our understanding of copyright and fair use”.  Given that he had written a book that advocates how to teach digital writing, we are happy to have his thoughts on Renee’s work during this podcast.

• At the end of the section, “What is transformative use?” Troy writes: “If we as educators can invite our students to think critically about their use of copyrighted materials in the process of creating their own digital compositions, and help them understand what it means to build on the work of another in a transformative way, then we can open up thought-provoking discussions about how we compose in the 21st century.”  Can you say more about that Troy?  How does that look in your own teaching?

Now some teachers might not think that this document pertains to them because we might not all understand the title and/or the concept of “Fair Use,” but one of the things I notice pretty quickly about the document (on page 2) is that media literacy is often embedded in other subject areas.  Additionally the description of Media Literacy Education seems to describe what students do in Youth Voices a lot of the time, and what more students will be doing the more they create digital compositions.

• ML is the capacity to access, analyze, evaluate, and communicate messages in a wide variety of forms
• ML responds to the demands of cultural participation in the 21st century
• ML like all literacy includes both receptive and productive dimensions
• media can influence beliefs, attitudes, values, behaviors and the democratic process

The Guide addresses… “the transformative use of copyrighted materials in media literacy educations that can flourish only with a robust understanding of fair use….  The Supreme Court has pointed out that fair use keeps copyright from violating the First Amendment….  Fair use helps ensure that people have access to the information they need to fully participate as citizens.  The fair use doctrine allows users to make use of copyrighted works without permission or payment when the benefit to society outweighs the cost to the copyright holder.”“for any particular field lawyers and judges consider expectations and practice in assessing what is ‘fair’ within that field.  So in essence we’re talking specifically about fair use in an educational setting, about how fair use applies to student digital compositions published on the Internet – Youth Voices.The Fair use Doctrine (section 107) of the Copyright Act of 1976 states that the use of copyrighted material “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research” is not infringement.In weighing the balance at the heart of fair use analysis, judges refer to four types of considerations mentioned in the law.

• the purpose of the use
• the nature of the copyrighted work
• the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the original work
• and the effect of the use on the market for the original

In recent years, legal scholars have found that courts return again and again to two questions in deciding if a particular use of a copyrighted work is a fair use

• did the unlicensed use “transform” the material taken from the copyrighted work by using it for a different purpose than that of the original, or did it just repeat the work for the same intent and value as the original?
• was the material taken appropriate in kind and amount, considering the nature of the copyrighted work and of the use?

Applying the doctrine of fair use requires a reasoning process, not a list of hard-and-fast rules.  It requires users to consider the context and situation of each use of copyrighted work.  So we want you to join us. We’ll present a couple of cases from our work on Youth Voices.

Click Read more to see a transcript of a chat that was happening during the webcast.

On this week’s Teachers Teaching Teachers, we had some follow-up’s, and some room for new voices. Paul Allison invited several of his students from the East-West School of International Studies in Flushing, NY onto the show to explain more about gaming. These students were listening and in the chat room on TTT#181 the week before when we talked about gaming in schools with other teachers, researchers, and consultants. The student had asked for a student-centered follow up. Listen to find out where gaming is in their lives.

And stay tuned every Wednesday evening this Spring as Paul and Susan Ettenheim and other students learn about bringing gaming into their curriculum this coming semester. If you know of a gamer, please invite him or her to join us as well! We’d love to include other students via Skype!

And if that’s not enough, this week's podcast also includes George Haines, a 6th grade teacher back on the show to talk about a Twitter project he was about to launch. George was on TTT in August: Teachers Teaching Teachers #165 - 08.26.09 - Meet Lisa Dick and George Haines: Talking about research and diigo George has written us recently to say that he hasn’t given up on “video and self-directed learning via youtube."

I haven’t scrapped that platform yet, but I decided to try to use Twitter for self-directed learning first. It is so much more nimble of a platform, I figured it would allow for a more fluid discussion and more immediate feedback and clarification.I saw that you have a youthvoices account on twitter and I just started following it. My kids are almost ready to start tweeting out their questions and connecting to other kids as part of this “KidSourcing” project. My kids are 6th graders, but I have invited any classes in the ballpark to connect with my kids. We are connecting to kids in Tanzania (http://epicchangeblog.org/2009/10/21/the-twitterkids-of-tanzania/) and I am working out the involvement with schools in Peru, Brazil, China and a couple here in the old U.S. of A. I don’t know how neatly our project meshes with what you are trying to accomplish with Youth Voices, but I figured I would reach out and gauge  your interest in connecting.Here is the basic outline for the project: The idea is to have kids search for answers from the crowd of kids with no help from the adults (aside from monitoring and guiding offline).

The idea is to seek answers to “why” questions as opposed to “What” questions. For example, a question that a kid can simply Google like “when did the civil war start?” is a bad one, but a question like “WHY did the civil war start?” is a good one. Questions that start discussions, lead to independent research and sharing links fit the bill. The idea would be to keep it loose and low impact- not a heavily dependent collaboration. I will probably tell my kids to post a new question each week and I will probably give them an arbitrary number of questions from other kids to help answer.

For the first month we will work in depth on the project, then I hope to make it part of the routine when they come to the lab, meaning they login and check twitter for 5-10 minutes before we launch into whatever other projects we are doing at the time. video and self-directed learning via youtube.I haven’t scrapped that platform yet, but I decided to try to use Twitter for self-directed learning first. It is so much more nimble of a platform, I figured it would allow for a more fluid discussion and more immediate feedback and clarification.I saw that you have a Youth Voices account on twitter and I just started following it. My kids are almost ready to start tweeting out their questions and connecting to other kids as part of this “KidSourcing” project. My kids are 6th graders, but I have invited any classes in the ballpark to connect with my kids. We are connecting to kids in Tanzania (http://epicchangeblog.org/2009/10/21/the-twitterkids-of-tanzania/) and I am working out the involvement with schools in Peru, Brazil, China and a couple here in the old U.S. of A. I don’t know how neatly our project meshes with what you are trying to accomplish with youthvoices, but I figured I would reach out and gauge  your interest in connecting.

Click Read more to see a transcript of a chat that was happening during the webcast.

 Welcome to this week's EdTechTalk (ETT) newsletter. Educon 2.2 took place this past weekend at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. Educon2.2 is in its third year, and is billed as both a conference and a conversation. Many ETT people attended and presented.  All conferences are archived on the site.

This week, we discussed how to promote learning through asynchronous discussions, in many cases, the heart of online courses. Issues considered include: developing a sense of community, structuring discussions, setting expectations, assessment and strategies for facilitating quality interactions.

Resources mentioned:

Joanna Dunlap: Down and Dirty Guidelines for Effective Discussions in Online Courses

Alice , Bob and Cheryl had our favorite conversation, the Horizon Report 2010! This is such a good report to provide the vision and checks and balances for our practice. The chat room was rocking too. Thanks for joining us. Let us know what your take is on the Horizon Report.

“Geek of the Week” Links for 2010-02-04

Join us for an exciting conversation with the inimitable and well-connected Lucy Gray who shares with us her passion for what's new in ipod/iphone educational apps, Google Teacher Academy and educational technology.

Join us as we catch up with Karin Muller of Take2 Videos as she shares her vision for the non-profit organization which she created. She was with us last year; it was great to have an update on an incredible initiative which places raw footage of areas of global conflict into the hands of North American students to create PSAs and documentaries. Karin is a world traveler and photojournalist whose work has appeared in such places as National Geographic and Discovery Channel.

Karin Muller wikipedia article

21st Century Learning #120
January 26, 2010
NCAIS with Jason Ramsden

A discussion with Jason Ramsden about the NCAIS conference. Their NCAIS blog is here.

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