Det är frestande att snygga till sina grejer med bilder från nätet - och så snabbt och enkelt gjort! Och vi har alla gjort det: "Lånat" en liten bild och kanske inte attributerat den heller.
Devient Art och Flickr är två ställen där man kan hitta mycket bilder som man FÅR använda, om man bara talar om vem som gjort dem. Och det känns ju alltid mycket bättre att göra rätt. Filmen nedan förklarar Creative Commons och upphovsrätten på ett trevligt och rakt sätt, så både jag och mina elever förstår.
Do you find that it is common for students to use copyrighted material in their work?
SvaraRaderaIt's very, very common where I work, but no one seems to bother! In fact I had to read the riot act last week when I caught students illegally downloading music from dodgy sites. They didn't have any concept that what they were doing was illegal!
Copy right is such a jungle! We've had the whole Pirate Bay issue, but the thing is that kids don't think it's illegal, "because everyone does it", and of course it isn't helping when half the adult community supports downloading too.
SvaraRaderaWe certainly don't allow torrent programs on the personal computers at school, and we're supposed to do random checks - but unfortunately we've only got one 50% staff to do all maintenance, warrantee and "code red" for all 700 computers, so he hasn't found the time to do any random checks, but I've told one person off for sporting a torrent client on her dock, in plain view. She claimed to have uninstalled it, "it was her brother", but I suspect she only hid it in the program's folder. If they are caught with illegally downloaded material on their computers the computer gets confiscated for two weeks, which puts them in it big time.
Since we started using Urkund, the service I told you about some months ago, we have seen a sharp decrease in copied texts. The latest fad is to translate texts via Google Translate and send them in. But as Google Translate is far from perfect it is quite easy to detect. Using pictures is a problem - I can certainly see why they want to spice up their reports with pictures, and it's so easy to just copy something, and if it's just a product for my consumption, and they have attributed them correctly I usually let it slip. If their are no sources I ask them to provide them, but I wouldn't fail them (if I haven't told them beforehand that I would).
But as we are moving further and further away from teacher oriented products, and want to encourage the students to share their work, to show off and be proud, we need to be very careful. We can't put copyrighted material on the school server, even if it is on the students' own web sites! So it is quite a struggle to not only to inform about the alternatives, but to keep up! Most teachers found it difficult to understand that they weren't allowed to copy more than 15 pages out of a course book, and still have few clues about copyright on the net. Some ban everything, just to be on the safe side, we are a few that try to inform fellow teachers and students about the alternatives, and I certainly try to encourage the students to be creative themselves: to take photos, to create a soundtrack using Garage Band, and so on.
Hard nut to crack that!
Oh yes, I'd forgotten that Pirate Bay was based in Sweden. That must make it tough to persuade students not to use it. Torrents are a great way to get legal stuff, but in our school access to them is blocked for the obvious reasons.
SvaraRaderaIt is a shame that your colleague doesn't have the time to check the student's laptops, as I suspect you would find all sorts of dodgy stuff on them (I have a nasty suspicious mind, sorry).
I do find it very frustrating that staff do say to our students, 'go on the internet and find pictures of....' and then use them in their work. It's them same with watching films. We are supposed to fill in a form to record every time a film is viewed to comply with our licence. A member of staff once got quite funny with me when they asked me to sort out a non working DVD player and I said 'you want me to get this pirated DVD to play for you then?'
As you say, a very hard nut to crack.