Week 11: Class Resources and Intellectual Property

Intellectual property and copyright issues are always closely related to every educator and student. Educators inevitably have to deal with these issues when they are using resources and materials for their class, etc. As for students, to avoid plagiarism, they  need to pay special attention to these issues when they are working on their assignments and papers. However, the reality is that not everyone knows and understands the rules of copyright and intellectual property clearly. For a lot of people, these rules are just blurry concepts. I guess this is one of the reasons why some college students plagiarize even without realizing their behaviors are wrong. Intellectual property and copyright issues have been becoming more and more complicated nowadays in the digital age.

I still remember a few years ago, before I officially started to teach Chinese in Kansas, there was an orientation for new teachers in our institute. One topic we discussed in this orientation was about intellectual property. Since we had to design and use PowerPoint in the class every day, we always embedded some online resources such as graphics and videos in the slides. Our supervisor emphasized that the URLs of these online resources were required to be added to the slides as well, but we didn’t have a detailed and comprehensive guide that teachers could consult. After that orientation, I was just sure that I wouldn’t have any trouble as long as I marked all the resources. I am glad that Ko and Rossen talk about these issues in the book. Their illustrations let me have a better understanding of intellectual property in the context of education. I found the Fair Use Guidelines for Educational Multimedia is very handy and useful. I also like the “Assuring Academic Integrity among Your Students” part. The tips mentioned in this section are useful for teachers to help their students guard against plagiarism.

Week 10 Blogs

I like Lisa’s visual map about the pedagogical use of blogs. It gives us some good hints and guidelines on how to determine the specific forms and ways of using blogs for class. I agree that teachers need to be very sure about their pedagogical goals of using blogs, or other social networking tools. I even think setting clear goals is the most important thing in the process. My personal opinion is that teachers should avoid using blogs or other social networking tools if their goals are vague, or their goals are just to spice up the class. After all, whatever technology tools that teachers use for class, the ultimate goal is to facilitate and enhance instruction, that is to say, to make instruction more effective.

Blogs can play different roles according to different pedagogical purposes. Just like Lisa stated in her presentation, it can be a forum, a resource center, a place for class presentation and interaction etc. As a student, I have used blogs, Google sites and wikis for my online courses. The teachers usually asked us to post reflections on our blogs and they commented on them. I also worked with other classmates to do group projects using Google sites and wiki. Overall, I enjoyed the experience of using these tools. Blogs, Google sites and wikis become additional communication bridges and platforms between teachers and students, between students and their classmates. They make the whole online learning process more convenient to some extent.

Speaking of communication, I start to think about the interesting questions Dr. Major raised about blogging: how do you know if someone has read it or not (and is that important?)? If no one reads it, have you communicated? If no one responds, have you connected? How do students feel if they blog and no one responds? From my perspective, it is important to know if someone, no matter the teachers or classmates, has read my blog or not. In most cases if people don’t leave comments, it is not likely to know all the readers. However, I could still see the hit count of my blogs. I don’t think I have really communicated if no one reads my blog. Communication is two-way. If no one read my blog, I can only say my blog is just a place to achieve my thoughts, but not a place to interact with others. Theoretically speaking, I should feel connected if someone has read my blogs even without commenting. But in reality, I will feel a little disappointed and frustrated. After all, we need others’ feedback and comments which are actually important in the communication process.

Week 9 Diigo and Second Life

Diigo is an interesting and convenient bookmarking tool. It can be utilized in our everyday life whenever browsing the web or reading articles online. This reminds me another popular social bookmarking tool called Delicious which is quite similar to Diigo. I am sure some of you also know them. As for its educational usage, I think teachers can use Diigo as a complimentary tool for instruction. There are many available online resources about the educational use of Diigo. I just did a little searching and picked some, which I think would be helpful for us to understand its application in education.

Social bookmarking - Diigo for Teachers

http://educationtechnology-theoryandpractice.blogspot.com/2011/06/social-bookmarking-diigo-for-teachers.html

10 Reasons to use Diigo

http://www.ictineducation.org/home-page/2009/11/2/10-reasons-to-use-diigo.html

Student Learning with Diigo

https://sites.google.com/site/team8project9440/using-diigo-in-the-classroom-2/using-diigo-in-the-classroom-1

As for Second Life, I am still skeptical about its educational value. The designing concepts of Second Life seem very fancy and advanced. There are also some successful examples of using Second Life in education. However, I still cannot figure out the sufficient reasons for spend so much money on purchasing a virtual island and building a virtual community. I remember last week Fang showed us the virtual Graves Hall which is “under construction”. There is a “test room” on the second floor in this building. If a teacher sets up a test in this “room”, his or her students’ need to move their avatars to this “place” and take the test in this virtual room. Students may think that is cool and interesting at the beginning, but I doubt if they will feel the same after doing that for several times. Why would I spend extra time to log on Second Life and try to find the right “test room” if I can just simply take the text online? For teachers, the cost of using Second Life and the required technology skills are relatively high. There are still a lot of issues of Second Life for researchers to discuss and resolve.