Entries Tagged 'Copyright' ↓

We had an interesting visit recently from some members of the work based learning  Regional Support Centre.  They’ve recently set up a “Ning” (Innovate) for providers to share good practise in the use of ICT.  So far it’s quite quiet, but these sort of things seem to need a sort of “critical mass” to become self sustaining so I’ve been keen to post a bit on it.

I mentioned in particular the work I’d been doing with trainee blogging.  This led into a discussion, the upshot of which was  two of the e-learning advisors who’d started the Ning coming down to visit and have a chat about it, with the aim of putting an article about it in the newsletter. 

“Focus on… Blogs” is the end result and is a nice summing up of what we’ve been trying to achieve.

Meanwhile the latest batch of learners have started on the “sandpit” phase of their project, experimenting and trying out the Wordpress software.  It’s a bigger group than normal and proving difficult to do whole group teaching.  (Our classroom is long and thin and the distance from the whiteboard at the back of the room is a bit of nightmare).  I’m heartily glad the main body of the taught sessions are now done and they can start working in smaller groups.

In order to try and catch the copyright issues early this time, and make sure people know what is expected of a typical post, I created a practise exercise for them to work through, which is embedded into the Sandpit practice blog itself.  I’m still having a bit of trouble getting some of the class to see why copyright is important, as opposed to something to be “got round”.

Not all the practise posts are in yet, but it’s showing up some interesting problems and misunderstandings already.  I’m using the comment feature to point out corrections which need to be made.  I also put together a “model” blog post for commenting on other sources, since wholesale copy and paste continues to be a bit of a problem.  Since I can’t seem to stop them doing it, maybe I can at least get them to do it properly so no one gets sued! 

I think I’ll try and use posts on the Sandpit to cover more of the skills as we’re going along.  Maybe have them post responses to things like the planning documents.

I took a different approach with this latest group and used a full afternoon to cover all the basic tools of Wordpress in one big hit.  The drawn out nature of showing them and having them try it out on the “Sandpit” last time, meant it was a long time before we actually got blogging and I wanted to avoid that this time around.   This worked quite well, and to my surprise hasn’t really led to the trainees needing a great deal more support.

The enthusiasm levels have been good, with several learners who were not keen to start with, really taking to it, and even asking if they can create another blog for their personal use.

Copyright issues have been integral this time, and I’ve only had to edit a few posts to remove unauthorised content.  I developed a one page “Copyright Crib Sheet” to lay down some ground rules.

The ICT Key Skills qualification, which we are using the blogging to contribute to, calls for learner to “combine information”, for example by annotating an image, and I’ve been exploring the use of online image editors such as Splashup and FotoFlexer (that last suggested by a learner!) to cover this.  I want to use our fledgling Moodle site to put up some notes on how to use these extra tools, as I’ll never have time to teach them all!

Also important to the Key Skills are the planning elements, and this was the first time I’d used the “How To grow a Blog” worksheets with the learners.  I had wondered about this, since I find the metaphor of a plant a good one, but wondered if my adult might find it a bit too child-like.  No one remarked on that aspect though, and the comments were reasonable.

The staff found them useful as evidence, though I have private doubts about whether the trainees themselves ever pay more than lip-service to “planning” their work!  It’s hard to make them see the advantages and we find the same issue with the Improve Own Learning Key Skill.  They’re far more product than process focussed — nature of adult learning I suppose, but at odds with my own inclination which is to experiment and try things out and think out other methods.

The commenting on each other’s blogs has also improved this time around and there’s some good back and forth going on.  One particularly interesting exchange occurred between a learner posting about immigration policy, and another who actually is an immigrant, their training course being done here in a second language.  Interesting expanding of horizons for several I think.

I tried to plan the groups around the learners I knew were regular absentees so no one group got hit too badly by having people missing, but the trainees have still noticed the problems when a key person — say the one individual who is the Admin, is away and they have to ask me to edit something instead.  Hopefully this will stand them in better stead in the workplace and appreciate the importance of attendance to group and team projects.

I wonder how much of the trainees confidence is down to the fact that I’m more confident this time around, having worked out some of the hiccups with the first group.  I’m looking forward to starting the next group, and will feel less put off by any initial disinterest, since this group have developed so well in spite of their initial doubts.

This time around I combined the “must do” topics – Health & Safety, Internet Security, and Copyright into one session dubbed “What can go wrong”.

Again I was surprised by how much they already knew on this topic.  Of course the security of personal information has been very much in the news lately with various governmental blunders with data security, including Child Benefit payments, and the DVLA.

Since I recently had to field a polite and sympathetic, but very firm request from an external organisation to remove their copyrighted material from learner’s blog, we also spent a good amount of time discussing copyright issues.

There were a few misunderstanding to clear up here, but nothing too unexpected.  Hopefully this time it will sink in and there will be less wholesale copy and pasting.  I will certainly be keeping a close eye on it.

All happy and positive again today! Managed to keep the taught session down to a quick whizz through adding links and maintaining a blogroll, before everyone had the better part of an hour to work on their blogs.

I was pleased to see a lot less copying and pasting going on this week and a lot more self-written content going up (along with plenty of spelling errors mind you, but at least there’s a proper genuine feel there. Spelling we can fix.)

Spent a lot of time with one group helping them add images, and was intrigued by the amount of time spent selecting just the right image from the Creative Commons tagged content on Flickr. A nice sense of pride in their work developing there.

A few people were struggling with what to write about, including one poor soul who’d found themself the only member of their group not absent!

I resorted in some cases to having them print out a website on relevant a topic of interest and get out pen and paper to summarise in their own words before posting.

I’ve seen a nifty tool at http://www.diigo.com which looks like you can do something similar actually online, but haven’t had a chance to play with it myself yet and have a gut feeling that some of the less confident learners need something down on a physical bit of paper to give them the impetus to start in any case. The feeling of having to make it up on the fly which posting online engenders is off putting to some of them.

One tool which I did find useful for those who were having trouble thinking of what to write is the ThinkTank from the 4Teachers website.

This allows you to enter a generic research topic and depends on type of topic (history, place, person etc) narrow it down to a list of questions. This then forms the outline of your topic and gives you something to go away and research online or type up.

The learners who were keen but found their chosen topic of, say, “My Town” too broad to start off with, found this useful, as it could be narrowed down to something more specific like “If I visited this place, what things would I want to see the most? What is interesting about this place?” or “When was this place founded? Who founded it? Who settled it? Why was this place chosen?”

Two to three questions seemed about right for a single blog post.  More questions or detail could be added for a full length Key Skills Project, and I may recommend this to some of them later on.

I’m using group discussion work with the class a lot more than usual during this project and it’s starting to work quite nicely. They always start out a bit stilted but soon relax into it. I’m hoping this is proving helpful to them, verbal skills are often a ’soft skill’ not really taught, and which could well be one of the things holding them back from work. If you can’t converse with your peers how on earth are you going to handle a job interview?

So hopefully it will prove helpful to them in the longer term, even though we’re not primarily a basic skills centre.

Today the discussion was on copyright and I had prepared some handouts for them to list all the things they could think of to which copyright might apply, and a definition in their own words of what “copyright” meant.

In order to get across the idea of copyright as being about “control” rather than a blanket ban on copying I asked them to make a list of things they want to stop people doing with their own work.  They came up with pretty much all the things that can typically feature in copyright statements, such as “keep my name on it” “don’t make money out of it” “ask my permission”.

I thought this was quite successful.  We came back together as a class and I clarified some of the detail and talked variously about the idea of “fair dealings” and how it various across the world — and that since the Internet is worldwide the issues of jurisdiction and potential pitfalls.

Some of the fair dealings stuff is so very vague here that I suspect a lot of it is too much of a judgment call for most of the students.   We therefore came up with some simple rules such as “don’t quote more than a paragraph of so”.  “make sure it’s clear i’s a quote and from where.” and “Link back to the original website rather than copying and pasting content.

I also explained about the alternatives, that some people have explicitly decided to allow copying and reusing of their work, and showed some examples, in particular the Creative Commons project.

I next sent them off to look up the copyright statements on a variety of websites.  I’d chosen these in advance for two reasons.  One, a good selection of different restrictions and allowances, and two, for being (relatively) short and easy to understand.

I’d wanted to get around to some practical work actually uploading images and setting up links on the blog sites but this took the whole hour and a half session so I didn’t manage that.

After the session I was playing with the WebQuest creation tools at http://www.zunal.com and thought that might be an interesting way of tackling this topic next time — having them look stuff up themselves, and being able to integrate the links from a single site rather than have them type them in from a paper handout.

Everyone now has some content up and the blogs are looking good.  Some learners were worried that other groups are progressing faster than them and worried about keeping up so I spent a few minutes to reassure them that, by definition, there’s no such thing as a “finished” blog!

The majority of the lesson today was just posting content and setting up categories and so forth.

Lots of learners asking about linking and putting images up but I’ve tried to put them off until next week when I can go over it with the whole group. Today I just wanted them to consolidate the skills they’d learned so far and get some content up there.

One reason for this was I wanted to go over copyright issues before we started posting pictures or using content from elsewhere, but here the learners where ahead of me and I had to have a hasty “copyright 101″ with one group who were wholesale copying and pasting from other sites.

“But it’s free if it’s on the Internet isn’t it…?” No one actually said as much but the assumption was hovering over the classroom!

I’m going to do a group session on it next time and am compiling a list of some “copyright friendly” resources for them to use.

The wholesale copied text was amended to short quotes with a link back to the site it came from.

Accrediting source material is something they’ll have to do in their upcoming Key Skills projects anyway, so hopefully it will be useful and relevant.