15 TOWARD A PEDAGOGY OF FAIR USE FOR MULTIMEDIA COMPOSITION

The WAC Clearinghouse; Parlor Press eBooks, 2011

These days, it's inevitable: writing and composition teachers are becoming media literacy teachers. As the Internet and computing technologies have created new forms of expression and communication that are multivocal, multimodal, collaborative, public, instantaneously accessible, and sometimes anonymously authored, anyone in the business of helping students develop the capacity for self-expression and communication bumps into key concepts of media literacy education. As Brian Morrison (qtd. in Yancey, 2004) pointed out, in the 21 st century, composition is "the thoughtful gathering, construction or reconstruction of a literate act in any given media" (p. 315). Writing teachers, typically tuned in to issues of identity, voice, and power, require sensitivity to how form and content interact when symbolic forms include not only printed language, but also sound, including the spoken word and music to name only a few, and still and moving images. These messages come to us through diverse forms that are variously commodified or non-commodified in an increasingly dense digital environment where economic, political, and social contexts shape both the creation and reception of messages. Composition educators recognize the rapidly shifting tectonic plates we are now facing in education. Kathleen Yancey (2004) recommended that writing and composition educators must develop a new curriculum for the 21 st century, one that expands beyond its roots in the intense and personal tutorial relationship between the teacher and the writer. According to Yancey, students need to consider how their compositions relate to "real world" genres; what the best medium and best delivery might be and so create and share different forms of communication via different media to divergent audiences; and how to adapt ideas across different media genres and technological forms. Within

2011

These days, it's inevitable: writing and composition teachers are becoming media literacy teachers. As the Internet and computing technologies have created new forms of expression and communication that are multivocal, multimodal, collaborative, public, instantaneously accessible, and sometimes anonymously authored, anyone in the business of helping students develop the capacity for self-expression and communication bumps into key concepts of media literacy education. As Brian Morrison (qtd. in Yancey, 2004) pointed out, in the 21 st century, composition is "the thoughtful gathering, construction or reconstruction of a literate act in any given media" (p. 315). Writing teachers, typically tuned in to issues of identity, voice, and power, require sensitivity to how form and content interact when symbolic forms include not only printed language, but also sound, including the spoken word and music to name only a few, and still and moving images. These messages come to us through diverse forms that are variously commodified or non-commodified in an increasingly dense digital environment where economic, political, and social contexts shape both the creation and reception of messages. Composition educators recognize the rapidly shifting tectonic plates we are now facing in education. Kathleen Yancey (2004) recommended that writing and composition educators must develop a new curriculum for the 21 st century, one that expands beyond its roots in the intense and personal tutorial relationship between the teacher and the writer. According to Yancey, students need to consider how their compositions relate to "real world" genres; what the best medium and best delivery might be and so create and share different forms of communication via different media to divergent audiences; and how to adapt ideas across different media genres and technological forms. Within

Copy(write): Intellectual Property in the Writing Classroom, 2011

You have been invited to participate on a college-wide committee to examine work-for-hire policies at your institution. During your first meeting, a committee member boldly claims that all work faculty and students create during their tenure at the institution should rightly be the property of the institution-especially considering the economic hardship and budget cuts facing most institutions of higher education. What is your response to this claim? An undergraduate student has accepted work doing freelance web authoring and design. She comes to you to ask what materials produced in a freelance capacity can be included in her professional portfolio. As both professor and professional mentor to this student, how might you advise her? You serve on an advisory committee for your college's library. A library representative and faculty member co-present their proposal to adopt a college-wide media use policy. The policy includes requirements such as " faculty can use 30 seconds of a 5-minute song" in their teaching, or " faculty can post 10 minutes of a 90-minute film on the college's streaming server" for class use. How might you advise in this situation? While working with a departmental curriculum committee, a committee member claims that there is no need to revise a writing course to include copyright and fair use because "there's not enough time to teach that, too." What might your response be? Preface xv National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and with the endorsements of over 80 academics across the U.S. as well as organizational support from the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing and the Writing in Digital Environments Research Center-submitted a letter to the copyright czar reflecting the concerns of writing teachers in preserving fair use in teaching and learning (Conference on College Composition and Communication, 2010). Over 1,600 comments were received by Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Espinel, and the 2010 Joint Strategic Plan on Intellectual Property Enforcement was issued in June 2010. Writing teachers have started to mobilize in their efforts to be heard regarding the continued development of copyright law and policy. The contributors to this collection drive that point further home as they detail the concerns and strategies that we face in our day-today responsibilities as teachers and researchers of writing. We think that this particular cultural, historical, and technological moment offers us the opportunity to make unique contributions to educating students, teachers, and others about the rights they currently have and about the issues they will face due to what clearly appears to be a government-backed "enforcement" mode in the area of intellectual property protection. If we want to be part of the conversations that craft fair work-for-hire policies at our institutions, and position ourselves as experts to teach copyright and fair use to writing students and to raise the legal issues professional writers will face in their work lives, now is the time to act. As a small move toward this, we offer a collection of writing that we hope will be just the beginning of the additional larger conversations we need to have about copyright and writing in the digital age. to assist learning, he noted, "and we, as educators, have failed in our obligation to embed this simple fact in the public's consciousness" (p. 1). To address this problem, Logie urged us to include a focus on copyright within our pedagogy. Steve Westbrook (2006) made an important move by connecting visual rhetoric and copyright in a very pragmatic context-a student's multimedia piece, which was unable to be published because the requisite permissions were denied by the copyright holder. Pointing to the missing student piece in his article, Westbrook wrote that copyright affects composition teachers and students "on the level of daily practice" and threatens to silence both teachers and students. The author suggested using Lessig's Creative Commons licensing as an immediate practical solution to the copyright problem. Westbrook's 2009 collection includes a chapter where he continues this discussion, pushing further at issues of visual rhetoric and copyright in the context of writing pedagogy. Jessica Reyman (2006) championed teacher awareness and activism, noting that the Technology, Education, and Copyright Harmonization (TEACH) Act of 2002 was developed to update copyright law to accommodate the uses of copyrighted materials in distance-education environments. And, yet, pursuant to her analysis of the TEACH Act and its implications for teaching writing, the act fails to offer the same protections for online teaching as it offers in face-to-face environments. Reyman argued that the TEACH Act provides an opportunity for faculty and their institutions to become more involved in the conversations about copyright and to influence law and policies. In Reyman's (2010) recent book, she discusses the narratives and metaphors within the intellectual property debate in a rhetorical context. This rich base of existing work in the field is the conversation we enter with this collection. Our collection is timely because we have some evidence from the legal and media literacy fields that teachers tend to misunderstand copyright and fair use and pass that misunderstanding on to their students (Hobbs, Jaszi, & Aufderheide, 2007). In September 2007, the Center for Social Media at the School of Communication at American University released a report stating that the key goals of teaching media literacy are "compromised by unnecessary copyright restrictions and lack of understanding about copyright law" (Hobbs, Jaszi, & Aufderheide, p. 1). In another study, Marjorie Heins and Tricia Beckles (2005) found that artists and scholars have only a vague sense of what fair use means, and this uncertain knowledge circumscribes composing practices. An additional study, "The Digital Learning Challenge," reported that undue fear about copyright infringement liability has constricted exchanges of valuable information across social network spaces (Fisher & McGeveran, 2006). William Fisher and William McGeveran found that because of digital rights management (DRM) technologies, the only way certain media can be accessed Preface xix even for purely educational uses is for teachers and individuals to knowingly violate copyright law by circumventing anti-access measures. This collection, more generally, also emerges from recent pedagogy-focused scholarship that argues that, because of the changed nature of writing in digital environments, teachers need to recalculate what they teach. On a broad level, the argument in favor of teaching intellectual property derives from the growing body of scholarship on informational literacy, multiliteracies, and digital literacies (

2018

The rapid proliferation of better quality “prosumer” equipment and powerful yet inexpensive editing software have helped erode the long-standing distinction between professional media producers and amateurs. Today’s aspiring young artists can take existing film, musical works, and other audiovisual material and transform them in varying degrees to create new work that comments on the world around them and that rivals in quality much of what Hollywood and professional musicians produce. However, this assessment is from the point of view of content. The looming specter of aggressive copyright policing by a litigious creative industry still divides the haves from the have nots. Industry monitors have been able to conduct mass takedowns of work they deem to be derived from their own, as provided for by the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Both pre-service teachers and aspiring media professionals must pay close attention to the copyright implications of creative work they c...

1998

2008

The fundamental goals of media literacy education-to cultivate critical thinking about media and its role in culture and society and to strengthen creative communication skillsare compromised by unnecessary copyright restrictions and lack of understanding about copyright law, as interviews with dozens of teachers and makers of media literacy curriculum materials showed. In K-12, higher education, and after-school programs and workshops, teachers face conflicting information about their rights, and their students' rights, to quote copyrighted material. They also confront complex, restrictive copyright policies in their own institutions. As a result, teachers use less effective teaching techniques, teach and transmit erroneous copyright information, fail to share innovative instructional approaches, and do not take advantage of new digital platforms. This is not only unfortunate but unnecessary, since copyright law permits a wide range of uses of copyrighted material without permission or payment. Educational exemptions sit within a far broader landscape of fair use. However, educators today have no shared understanding of what constitutes acceptable fair use practices. Media literacy educators can address this problem with the same techniques they use in their work: increasing shared knowledge. Like other creative communities, such as documentary filmmakers, media literacy educators from K-12 to university level can articulate their own shared understandings of appropriate fair use in a code of practice. This code can educate not only themselves and their colleagues, but their students and administrators. Finally, their code can guide and instruct other educators, in formal and informal settings, who use copyrighted material in their teaching for a wide range of educational purposes and goals.

International Journal of Learning and Media, 2009

2007

The primary factor causing the world to shrink in the 21st century is the Internet. While webenabled services enhance information sharing and facilitate collaboration, the proliferation of the Internet has also led to an erosion of respect for intellectual property. A key contributor to this erosion is the concept of Academic Fair Use. On the surface, Academic Fair Use would appear to be a means of protecting intellectual property. In reality, Fair Use policies can lead to an increase in less-than-ethical practices that are bred in academia and then transfer to the workplace. In this paper, we identify the problems associated with employing Academic Fair Use, and then share techniques that we use to help our students internalize ethical practices. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the United States Military Academy, the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense or the United States Government. students not only understand that most of the material they find on the Internet is protected by copyright law, but they also experience the process of ensuring they have permission before using copyrighted material. All this takes place not in a seminar class on ethics, but in mainstream Information Technology classrooms.

Techtrends, 2011