Intellectual Property

This week's voicethread focused on intellectual property and some related issues to the topic. It was a good way to start considering if online interactions and content sharing may have associated risks. Efforts for protecting intellectual property was covered as well. This area covered the reaches of copyright, fair usage, public domain, and Creative Commons. Copyright deals with the legal areas concerned in ownership of material. Fair Usage pertains to reasonably using information for educational purposes, mainly by libraries. When content has an expired copyright it can no longer be owned by individuals and becomes public domain online. Finally, Creative Commons relates to open access in others' usage of content.

Creative Commons still regulates how items are being copied, distributed, and built upon. This usage also has layers of legal, technology, and personal considerations. I found out our EME 6414 course blog actually has a Creative Commons license. The Creative Commons website was an interesting place to check out. It provides a lot of information on their current work, some featured projects, accomplished representatives, and shares news updates.

Another point stemmed from intellectual property that we are looking at in the discussion board is whether it is ok to give away creative content for free. One of the website examples posted that I am familiar with was Teachers Pay Teachers. TpT is a great resource with webpages full of lesson and activity materials that are generally available at low costs or free to fellow teachers. They even have a blog and other active community features.

Between Teachers Pay Teachers and Pinterest, I have seen that there is usually pretty clever and creative content within reach for educators in K-12 settings. Unfortunately, during my teaching experience much of this material was not provided by core curriculum being used recently to teach in elementary school classrooms (or at least in Florida.) Curriculum development and educational resources made more available to instructors online or in print formats for K-12 grades and beyond are currently bigger interest areas for me within the Instructional Design field.