The Importance of Understanding and Utilizing Fair Use in Educational Contexts: A Study on Media Literacy and Copyright Confusion
This brief paper discusses the recent study conducted by Hobbs, Jaszi, & Aufderheide (Oct. 2007), The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy, and its implications for educators and particularly writing teachers. This paper is also available along with other Top Intellectual Property Developments of 2007, hosted on the website of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).
Media Convergence: Grand Theft Audio: Negotiating Copyright as Composers
Abstract Today, writing often requires composers to draw upon multiple modes of meaning making. Today's computers and robust networks allow writers to choreograph audio, video, other visual elements, text, and more. This is new. Admittedly, some professionals have been mixing media for years to create advertisements, movies, and CDs, for instance, but access to these technologies is now available in ways we haven’t seen before—and multimedia composing rubs against issues of intellectual property in ways we haven’t seen before, at least not in the writing classroom. In this manuscript, we address issues of copyright trouble and fair use related to multimedia composing in our current cultural context of media convergence. Specifically, we use a piece of work titled Grand Theft Audio as a launching point to discuss the ways in which copyright trouble is inevitable in multimedia composing. The piece draws on appropriated, remixed, and reconfigured audio, video, text, and images to pose a particular argument about the affordances of media convergence and issues of negotiating copyright permissions. We scaffold our discussion of Grand Theft Audio with the work of scholars including Martine Rife, John Logie, and Lawrence Lessig to push at the ways digital composing is situated in a free use vs. “permission culture” climate.
Initial Teacher Training: the French view
ABSTRACT This paper, against the background of trends in the development of initial teacher training in Europe as a whole, identifies and explains some of the recent, radical reforms which were introduced in France by a socialist government. These include the need to raise the status and the competence of the teaching profession; the creation of new teacher‐training institutions of university status (Instituts universitaires de formation des maitres); the introduction of common entry qualifications at degree level for both primary and secondary levels; the harmonisation and the extension to 2 years of the post‐degree teacher‐training course and the increase in emphasis placed on professional training, both theoretical and practical. These reforms provoked a storm of protest and an examination of the reasons for this reveals a multiplicity of crucial questions which have far‐reaching implications.