This month we have been learning about Cyberbullying and House Bill 2599, an Act that went into effect in Oregon on July 1, 2009. The Act relates to Cyberbullying, creating regulations that school districts must have in place to deal with "hostile educational environments." Students learned that the school district has policy in place to deal with students who are creating reasonable fear in other students. We viewed a video and had discussion around the idea that while we sometimes think we are acting in jest, it can sound very serious to the person on the other end of an email, IM, text, etc.
Yesterday we started a new topic of discussion: Copyright. I have been amazed at the number of questions that students have about downloading songs, borrowing songs, copying songs and giving them away. We talked about the rights of an artist, an author, the recording industry, and the movie industry. Many students asked about Youtube and the many songs, movies and television shows that they see there. We talked about Napster and the can of worms that they opened and about Limewire and if the videos and songs they download there are OK to get. We talked about the difference between creative commons videos, songs, etc. and copyrighted work.
We are living in a viral age, where everything is available. I think that it boils down to educating ourselves about the about the legal use of copyrighted material.
I like the Stanford University website, it's broken down in plain English and will hopefully help with questions you might have. Check it out at:
http://rescomp.stanford.edu/info/dmca/
