CSE 619:

I have to be honest, it took me a couple times reading sentences over to fully understand what is being said. After kind of getting the flow of the text it got me thinking that there is a lot more than what I originally thought that goes into creating your own community. The first couple of paragraph got the layout of the baser needs of the community. At first I was a little afraid that I would actually have to make my own community.

Reading The Public Domain Enclosing the Commons of the Mind match what I already understand with how things always start at a base point but grows and expands on the point that came before it. The quote in the book, “…while the facts below (and ideas above) would remain free for all to build upon” (page 57, paragraph 3, (Boyle, 2008)) is where I made the connection of building upon what is our prior knowledge.

The information that is given in The Public Domain Enclosing the Commons of the Mind has very good evidence to back up its arguments by using reports, studies and databases from different places around the world. I think it is very smart that Boyle also compares different databases like the European Database Directive and the U. S. database directive.

The chapters about songs and particularly the song written by Mr. Randle and Micah Nickerson was a little out there compared to what was being said in the chapters before. Reading the song called “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People” got me a little upset because I hate to think that at this day in age we still have to fight through segregation.

 This part of the book has me thinking that I really need to be aware of my students and how I act with all of them. I need to be aware if anyone is feeling like I am picking on them more than others. I remember when I was in high school and in my English class we were playing a game of Jeopardy to study for the upcoming test. As we were playing the game the teacher was making calls that helped one team more than it did the other. I remember being very upset about it because she was picking favorites.

I work with second and third graders at an after school care and I pride myself on how I try my hardest not to have favorites and make sure my instructions are fair for everyone.  I believe that the worst thing that a teacher can do is show that they have favorites and are not fair in their decisions.

To be the best teacher I can be I will treat every student equally. I will make sure I have in place for myself ways to make sure my decisions will be fair for all of my students. I will spend my time as evenly as possible with all of my students. Last but not least, I will make sure my students know that they can come talk to me about anything.

CSE 619:

Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright by Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi helped me get a better sense of what is and is not copyright. In high school I was taught about copyright and how to site sources. It got a little trickier when there were different ways to site sources. It helped when Microsoft Word allowed me to choose what form of sighting sources I needed.

When reading this book the part that I did not know from before reading this book was the concept of ‘Fair Use.’ I believe that there is a very thin line between what is considered plagiarism or just, now what I know is called, fair use. I like that there were many examples of actual situations where directors or writers had to figure out if and when they needed ask permission to use other pieces of other work.

While writing this blog post I had a really difficult time making sure that what I am writing will not be considered plagiarism. It is helpful when examples are given that help me put what is being said into a different way of looking at things. For an example, there is a quote in the book that says, “They called them “skeletons”-courses so bare that they were unhelpful teaching tools-and “Swiss cheese”- full of holes where crucial copyrighted material had been removed”  (Jaszi, 2011). When authors use illustrative words or a food/object so I am able to place that picture in my head and make those connections to the text.

It is quite interesting the process that people have to go through in order to get permission to use a 10 second clip in a movie or something else that is not that big of a thing. It is a little funny to me to think of lawyers have to get involved and it can often be a long and windy process. There is also the added step of all the other people that need to get involve such as, supervisors, insurers, publishers, and other authority person.

I was watching a show on HGTV and the lady was a professional blogger. I did not know that there was such a thing because I do not understand how you can make money from that but then the reading for the past weeks got me thinking that people like professional bloggers need to be very careful what they post and how they post it. To me it would seem that doing something like being a professional blogger would be more work than is really necessary and I would want to do something that would not put all that pressure on myself.

However, to go along with the last paragraph, the same could be said about being a teacher because we as teachers need to make sure that we are covering our own tails when creating a lesson. I remember when I was doing my student teaching and I had all of these big ideas to do with my students and I had to think about sighting the sources that I would be using. It is sad to say that some of my big ideas I changed because the sighting of it was a little too complicated than was really necessary for that particular lesson. It was also a recurring theme within my classes that my teachers encouraged us to use things that we found elsewhere and less time trying to make something up on our own.

I really took away a lot from this book and I am excited to have it as a reference point in my other assignments.