Last week, we gave our online students an activity on Copyright and Fair Use: Do the Right Thing, which I have also recently posted in the Maricopa Learning eXchange:

http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/slip.php?item=1264

The subject merits almost an entire course in itself, but we boiled it down to sending them to to excellent web tutorials:

(1) Intellectual Property Law: Why Should I Care?- Carlos And Eddie in ‘Rock Machine’ is a nicely designed site geared for students based on the story of the antics of two cartoon drawn college students.

(2) University of Texas Copyright Tutorial has a great wealth of information found inside the UT Crash Course on Copyright

They were to review each site, take the simple online quiz from each, and post a discussion board message about their “scoires” and what they learned. Unfortunately, it seems we needed to spell out very specific questions for them to respond to besides “I liked the site”.

However, our follow-up activity this week is soaring like an eagle! We have invited a guest expert, an associate dean of instruction from one of our colleges that has probably the most experience in this area. Dr. Mary Lou Mosley participated a few years back (as the only rep from a community college) in a national task force of educators and copyright holders to develop fair use guidelines for educators. She has a great presentation online called “©opyright Doesn’t Mean “Copy it Outright!”.

The activity was for them to pose two specific questions (related to the course or content they teach) on copyright, fair use, intellectual property– Mary Lou offered to visit the discussion area once on three days this week. This is also turning out to be a great example of the power of using the internet to bring in remote experts– typically people think of doing this as live chat sessions, but with our smaller class size and schedules, synchronous meeting is not feasible.

Some questions already posed: