Reading Ko and Rossen (Ch. 8), and watching the TED Talks video by Larry Lessig (as well as the other online resources) really opened my eyes to many issues surrounding copyright that I had not previously spent too much time thinking about. I don’t show movies in my classrooms (other than brief Youtube.com, Films on Demand, or Intelecom clips) and we mostly use the class text book, with some supplemental articles online as outside materials. However, I realize, that this is an important issue, that I need to consider. I found myself doing the mental checklist, (“nope, I don’t do that, so it’s all good”) as I was going through the material. But, I have to check myself, and it opens up some questions for me. I do show a documentary on one of my classes, is that copyrighted? Do I need to get approval? I think I will check into that.
I look at how much students in my Psychology 101 class pay for their text book, $246.00. This is outrageous, and some of them clearly cannot afford it. I love the idea of free ebooks being posted online and approved for use in our classes. I briefly searched and there did not seem to be a good fit for my class, but this really opened my eyes. I did not know these resources were even available!
I really appreciated reading about web accessibility and I believe it is important to make sure our online classes are sensitive to students with special needs.
Lastly, encouraging academic integrity is an important issue in education. In my f2f classes we review the concept of plagiarism, they watch a brief informational video on it, and they have a simple 10 point assignment where they have to cite a couple sentences. Even with all this, I still have students plagiarize throughout the semester. Does anyone have any great methods or tools that seem to be effective in teaching students to avoid plagiarism?
I started working on the mind map, but will need to continue to work on that :). I am interested in hearing who uses the mind map and how? Thanks!!