Week #1 Blog Post Comments #1

Wk1 Reading Blog EDMT:MAC

As an undergraduate student, I was instructed on some things that accruing to the letter of the law and these videos turn out to just be wrong. I was an early adopter of media for content creation by students, and I paid huge sums of money for image banks and libraries on disk to keep from using only the staid old Microsoft Office templates. Now I feel that money was a waste, but I also can create most of what I want from scratch rather than borrow from others.
For the most part this has been my solution for dealing with the vagaries of Fair Use and copyright protections. Occasionally I will request and usually do receive permission for someone else's work, but by and large I just try to create new media rather than adapt, adopt, or re-mix someone else's efforts.  I know that this reinforces my old man status in the class, but back in my day, "borrowing" was simply not tolerated in academic circles. I watched several friends get the boot for plagiarism during college and even found myself defending my own source code during early programming classes!
These videos were important to reinforce the need to keep Fair Use alive. I am like the film makers who were not so subtly told to just let go of anything which may hint at being Fair Use. I have to admit to even  scrapping entire sections of presentations when no graphics or video to support them could be created in time.
One benefit to media asset development is that I have been creating an archive portfolio with many audio, video, and visual elements to draw from. I am also seeing that these resources can be used across many disciplines.

As it applies to the course I am impressed with the pains that our instructors have gone to to ensure that they and we follow the law and apply copyrights through Creative Commons to our class creations. Even though most of my work currently is listed as public domain, I see the need to limit its access as new opportunities such as self book publishing through iTunes arise. Imagine the possibilities for students with our uniques sets of skills in education and media development!

Dwayne Buchanan Feb 3, 2012 06:52 PM

@ Smitty,
We have several things in common. I see you have gone out and asked permission to use certain things and had mixed reviews about responses. In my first Masters program I was doing my thesis on the effects of an after school robotics program on attendance and grades in science and math. I had written a company to get permission to use their name in my thesis and I never heard from them. I consequently had to go back and change the wording in the thesis in order to not have their name in it and it was a headache.

I have also used many of my own images to save the headache.I like using my own work and the personal side it brings to the table.