For the past six days I’ve been teaching a lesson on Copyright, Fair Use, and Creative Commons to the 10 sections of my Digital Literacy course.  About half-way through the cycle, I made a rather timely discovery; another school has taken the liberty of copying our 7th grade Digital Citizenship program!

I’m all for sharing and while this may seem flattering to some, it is in violation of the Creative Commons Licensing Agreement we used when posting our project to Wikispaces.  Based on the terms of our license, individuals and organizations are free to copy, distribute, and transmit our work under these conditions:

I am not going to post a link to the “other” Digital Citizenship site, but my students and colleagues who have seen it can attest that (1) it does not include attribution, (2) it does include some minor additions that in effect “build upon this work” and (3) seeing a near mirror-image of our program made for a powerful teachable moment.

It is a safe bet that most (if not all) educators, myself included, have bent/broken copyright laws and Fair Use guidelines at some point.  While our intentions may be good (we want to teach using the best resources we can find), that doesn’t make our actions right.  We need to set a positive example for our students and make thoughtful, informed choices when we repurpose someone else’s work.  The person who plagiarized our program apparently hasn’t learned that lesson yet, but thanks to him my students sure have….

Posted: 10|22|08 at 6:57 am. Filed under: Digital Citizenship, Digital Literacy.
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