Reflecting upon a Semester of Blogging

Hello!

So this is the end of the semester! During the past week, we read about fair use and copyright in the digital media world–a topic about which I had been willingly ignorant of (to be quite honest). We used two readings for this:

1. Part of a book by Renee Hobbs entitled Copyright Clarity: How Fair Use Supports Digital Learning. (We focused on Chapter Four: “Fair Use and Digital Learning.”)
2. A chapter from Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education in the 21st Century
   (Harry Jenkins et.al.), entitled “Why We Should Teach Media Literacy: Three Core Problems.”

Copyright laws are put in place to protect the creators and users of information and work that has been publicly accessed. Although people who create things and share them with the world have a right to the ownership of their work, there are also fair use laws that are in effect which depend on how that work is used by a new user. This has involved my semester in CURRINS 547 because, for each blog that we publish, we’re required to have a certain amount of writing, a link to a relevant website, and some sort of image. The writing and the link, of course, didn’t have as much to do with copyright laws. The pictures, however, did. I searched on Google for pictures that were relevant to my topic and put them into my postings. For each one, I created a hyperlink below and within the picture to the website from which I selected the image. Is this enough? Maybe, maybe not. I did not alter the image, but I did use the image for a new purpose that does not align with the original use. In other words, I made a transformative use of those images. (To see what I mean by that, check out the Copyright Education User Rights, Section 107 Music Video.) I simply used the same picture in my blog to serve a similar function. If I had transformed those pictures into something new or used pieces of it for a new purpose, fair use rights would likely apply. For now, though, I would like to go back and revise those blog posts, but I will not have a moment to do so by the time this post is published. Also, to brush up on your knowledge of copyright and fair use laws, you can check out Education World’s five-part series about it.

Now! Onto other business:

Since it is the end of the semester, the members of our class will be nominating our fellow classmates for awards in some of the following categories: professionalism, design, creativity, and people’s choice. Here are my submissions for the consideration of the class:

Professionalism: Process Model (*not* Stage Model) for Writing

• I have chosen this one because I was able to use some of the professional language about writing which I have acquired over time as a writing tutor. As I was writing it, I felt as though I was talking to a tutee about the process model of writing (which is something I’m very familiar with and am therefore  comfortable talking about).

Design: First Infographic: Citation Styles

• I have selected this post for my design submission because this is a post in which I have taken a commonly discussed topic and put it in a visible form. It was also my first time using Piktochart

Creativity: I have two. My first submission is one that I did not post for class but did post during the semester as a result of having begun this blog for class. It is my Graphic Novels post, in which I catalog some of the processes and materials I used for creating a curriculum board at the library. If this is ineligible, then I’ll submit The Photo Essay and Digital Composition post.

People’s Choice: The Literacy Lair by our friend Marcy. I enjoyed reading her posts over the course of this semester, and I found that her posts tended to be the ones which most engage with the materials in class and which expanded upon that content to apply it to her current (or near future) teaching practices.

Below is a fair use image…because I made it! This was my first image creation using the app called Word Swag, which has proven to be really cool!

The words are weird, I know. But I apparently couldn’t think of anything better to say about rice while I was first figuring out how to work with the app.

Thanks for reading!

~Sarah