Last night, my friend and colleague Tom Foster invited be as a “guest expert” (hah!) for a class he is teaching at Arizona State University, “Social and Ethical Issues in Educational Media”. The students were all K-12 teachers, librarians, and media specialists, and they had amazing, heroic energy for a group who had worked all day with kids, then put up with technology stuff from 5-9 PM.

The class had already reviewed issues in Copyright and Fair Use, and Tom asked be to take the turn from the messages of what they cannot do in terms of using media found on the web, to one of, what they can do.

So I took a cue from Brian Lamb, and set up the who workshop in a wiki, Finding (and Using!) Good Free Stuff.

I have been a fan of Brian’s approach at UBC of making the wki his presentation outline and activity focus as well. First of all, it is very quick to build. You can easily re-dploy the same content for a different workshop be either editing the titles or copying to a new wiki page. But best of all, you can expose people gently and subtly to the wiki way.

Anyhow, the focus of last night’s session was to introduce the class to the value of using media resource sites marked by Creative Commons licenses, where the re-usage is more clearly defined. We provided a longer laundry list of media resource sites where they might find relevant media items.

Then for an activity, we had them spend time at these sites, locate a media item they can cite as useful in their teaching area, and we had the post a summary to a FoundFreeStuff wiki. I was pleasantly surprises that all 16 of them managed to get one or two wiki items added, despite the freakish things IE was doing to the web pages and the weird things that happen when wiki editing collides (on the spot problem-solving- create a second open wiki page).

Some observations:

• There are a lot of assumptions that just because a web site has the word “Free” in it, or in the URL, that the stuff there really is free to take and use.
• It is not clearly defined on US Government web sites whether the content truly falls under public domain as being products of the government (more research needed here.
• None of these teachers knew what a blog or a wiki was. I provided them the URLs for the Stephen Downe’s new EDUCAUSE article on Educational Blogging and Brian Lamb’s one on wiki spaces. Since they were k-12 teachers, I made sure they saw Will’s Weblogg-ed site (it was 9:00 PM when one teacher asked , “What is RSS?”– that we told her, was another whole class session!).
• Copyright and use of media is as muddy as ever.

Update: Sept 1
Tom sent some copies of the class comments gathered in the course discussion area…