Digital Ethics & Literacy

Copyright is murky. There isn't a clean, easy way to know what's fair use and what isn't, and there are a lot of myths. I like to refer to this video when discussing fair use: Copyright on Campus.

After taking "Digital Citizenship," I was really inspired by open content for ZTC courses. Now whenever I'm helping redesign a course, I always ask if the instructor has considered OER as a supplement and/or as a replacement for a textbook. Digital Citizenship showed me how freeing using OER content can be. The course becomes its own entity without the need for a textbook integration. I really like how it offers an opportunity for creativity that a traditional textbook tends to limit. Using OER to design a course allows the course to be exactly how the instructor envisions it. I gained a lot of new inspiration participating as a student in student-created content such as Canvas wiki pages and creating Adobe Spark videos. One way that I've suggested this use to faculty is to create a wiki page in Canvas as a sort of hub for topic selection/ideas. The wiki page in Canvas would allow students to try out editing a Canvas page and a space to publicly post to the class their topics. What I also like about this is that students are able to see what their peers are writing about to get inspiration for their own topics as well as build an understanding of their peers' interests. Our department hosts workshops throughout the semester on new tools to incorporate into courses, and one of those tools is Adobe Spark. It seems at least one instructor always mentions that Adobe Spark is great for instructional videos, but that it would also be great for students to try to create. As I continue to work more with instructors to develop activities for their courses, I'd like to encourage this use.

To model best practices for using OERs, I always use sources for images/media that are openly licensed. I create attributions (as I've done throughout this site and at the bottom of this page) to model ethical behavior by giving credit to the creators, even when it isn't technically "required." I want to help norm the use of attributions so that the use of OERs begin to feel normal as well.