Sunday, May 8, 2016

Week 2: Copyright

Use in the classroom or educational setting:

I teach EGR 190, digital circuits class to freshmen engineering students. This course is designed to teach students the main aspects of the main building blocks of computer chips. I created the following padlet to ignite some discussion in the class and perhaps have students speculate what those images are all about. As a starter, they probably will not have any idea what they will be learning from the course. I hope that this introduction activity will help them think about the concepts. The course will be taught in active learning classrooms at CMU, where there are monitors on each round table for students to explore the digital content and discuss with their groups. Students will also be asked to submit a short reflection on the padlet to foster thinking on the course.

The learning objective would be:
“Students will discuss the digital content provided via padlet and make connections between the real world circuit applications and course content.”

From the padlet, students will perhaps notice my citations. I will make sure to point that out that it is very important to cite or give credit to contents they access on internet. Furthermore, should I use any student creation of artifacts, I will properly cite on my slides where the image or work came from. I believe being a role model will be the crucial part of conveying the message about copyrights. I will also enforce this approach on student presentations.

Application:

Looking back to multimedia instruction, I do believe that pre-training is important, that is to provide students some keywords before the class. By asking students review the padlet in advance will help them start thinking about the material and potentially make them get familiarize with key concepts. One should also be careful not overwhelming students with redundant information which will surely reduce their learning. Lastly, providing “cool” images will hopefully have students pay attention to the content during the class which will make them remember the material better. This will mainly happen because the information will be pushed towards the working memory rather than staying in the sensory register.

Reflection:

Well, I have always been aware of plagiarism but I did not pay attention to different licensing acronyms. I learned quite a lot. I loved flicker but also enjoyed Wikimedia. I was a bit confused in the past about plagiarism and copyright issues. I think I get it now. What stoke me the most was that youtube content is also copyrighted. Going through different licensing types and finding images on a specific content was challenging but now that I know what to look for, it will not be as painful! I liked the idea of padlet. It is quite neat and I had never heard before (shame on me!). I will sure be more careful and mindful when I use digital content (or any content what so ever) from now on in my classes.

6 comments:

  1. This is fantastic! Tolga? Can you help me post my padlet to my blog? I do not understand where it should be pasted. Isee it however, it appears as a link and not the padlet page. My e-mail is wakef1ae@cmich.edu


    Alesia

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    1. Alesia, sorry for my lack of response to you. I was quite busy (just moved our home to another city). But you did figure it out, good job!

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  2. Tolga,
    Like you my Padlet and lesson were highly technical in nature. I think when dealing with technical material, as you point out, Mayer’s Pre-training Principle is very important. By asking the student to review the material they can get familiar with the basic concepts but like you point out there is always a danger in overwhelming the student.
    As you point out in your reflection, YouTube videos are copyrighted but like Google there is a way to restrict your search to creative commons content. You do so by clicking the filters dropdown then clicking creative commons.
    Another topic I found highly informative was what constitutes “Fair Use”. Fair Use allows you to use copyright materials in certain ways without violating someone’s intellectual property. If you’re at all interested in Fair Use you should check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S521VcjhvMA.
    Thanks again for your post.

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    1. Eric:
      Thank you for the comments on "Fair Use." I really like the fact that you are allowed to utilize materials in many ways. Its almost like you have unlimited use of items.

      Alesia

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    2. Thanks Eric for your feedback. I honestly have not been utilizing filters for google search and youtube as much as I should. I will dig a bit deeper to fair use so I am more comfortable incorporating into my presentations and lessons. Thank you again.

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  3. Hello Tolga,
    I really enjoyed perusing the resources on your Padlet. I've seen the photo of the giant silicon wafer before but that's really interesting. I think that this will be an excellent way for your higher education students to make sense of your unit on circuits. I know that when it comes to technical situations, I need to have a visual before I understand it more fully. I did not know what some of your terms meant like a logic gate but I was inspired to look it up, and it seems like abuilding block of pretty complex system. I'm curious about your class now as well. Do you give your students practical application of your concepts or hands on activities with building chips? I imagine that would be a somewhat longer project, if you did.

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