Week FINAL, Thing 23: The Pit Bull Librarian

I participated in a 6-hour workshop today about online learning, including an overview of BlackBoard. The instructors were prepared, knowledgeable and experienced. They modeled what they wanted us to learn and utilized Web 2.0 technologies. Overall, it was a good session.

But in six hours not one word was said about copyright. Granted, 6 hours isn't much time to discuss online learning even to an audience that had some online class experience and previous training. But I'm not too surprised because I seldom hear copyright discussed in other trainings either outside of the library field.

It seems as though only librarian-based (Is that a word?) workshops engage participants on copyright. In many schools only the librarian and maybe a few administrators even think about copyright.

Do you want to be the Pit Bull (no complaining about dog stereotypes please; I LOVE all dogs!) of copyright in your school? Sometimes I think my teachers see me that way.

"No, it's not really legal for your to transfer those VHS tapes to DVD for your convenience. Yes I know it's crazy for you to pay $49 per movie when you could make it yourself for free. I just thought you would want to know about copyright." Pit Bull Copyright Librarian

"OK, don't look and I won't tell you what I do...." Earnest Teacher

The copyright video in this lesson was certainly clever but 10 minutes of clips was a bit much for me. I can only imagine that it took the producer/directors an eternity to find and piece those clips. I appreciated the work and creativity but think HS students would get impatient. I thought that copyright comic book was very graphically appealing and hip but perhaps too sophisticated for HS students. However, we need to be sure we are teaching our teachers and students about copyright, especially if their work will be posted online. We also need to educate them about creative commons.

For teachers or librarians who want an in-depth lesson on copyright, Carrie Gardner teaches a great class on intellectual freedom at Mansfield University.

Open Source software and Open Course programs, such as MIT OpenCourseware, are very fascinating. All educators should be following the trend. Web 2.0 seems to me to be part and parcel of that concept.