Fair Use/UDL - Week 3

This week we learned about fair use and Universal Design for Learning. We also continued work on our websites and learned about menu bars and some additional formatting information.

Fair use has four major characteristics that we can use to determine whether our use of a material is "fair". The characteristics are the purpose of the use, nature of work, amount taken, and effect on the market. Using this information, we can use a scale to determine whether something is okay to use on a website, in class, etc. For example, it would not be fair use to put a full song in a podcast or on our websites for "the whole world" to see/use/download. The reason for this is that although we may be using for educational value, it is a creative work, we have taken the song in its entirety, and it could potentially have an effect on sales of CD's of the song.

We learned about the creative commons license, which states that others can use your work as long as it meets certain criteria: it must be used for non-commerical purposes, the user must give credit to the producer of the work, and the user cannot alter it. This helps explain how we can use many items of creative work for educational purposes without breaking any fair use laws.

We also discussed Universal Design for Learning. The concept of this idea is that we want to create and use materials that accomodate the widest spectrum of users possible without the need for specializing the design or adapting the materials for certain users. The three principles that support UDL are recognition learning, strategic learning, and affective learning. Recognition learning refers to ways to take knowledge in, strategic learning refers to how we are able to express what we learned, and affective learning is centered around motivation; students should be able to choose networks to engage themselves in a topic that are motivating to them.

These ideas can be easily related to concepts we will use as teachers in the future. Fair use laws are extremely important to understand, as we will be using many types of media and references in our teaching. We need to know what we can record off of tv and show to our classes, how much of a poem or book we can copy to share with the class, as well as other materials we may use. It is also important to relay this information to our students, so that they know what they are allowed to use in creating various projects. I remember from when I was in school, that teachers often brought videos, taped shows, and copied literature to class for use. We will need to consider these rules carefully in determining what to bring to class.

UDL is a very important concept for teachers to understand. There is increasing diversity found in the classroom currently. We are seeing increases in multi-cultural classrooms as well as learners with disabilities in the class. We will need to make sure we are using materials that will help reach the most students possible. We must understand that students learn in very different ways, and the best way to help a whole class learn is to have outlets for them to learn in the ways that best suit them. We should keep this in mind while planning lessons for our future classes.

Regarding fair use, I am wondering who the best person to ask is if we are not sure whether our use of a material is "fair" or not. We discussed talking to the author/producer directly or a media specialist in a school, if available, but it seems to me that they will not know about every material we may want to use in the classroom. Is there a board or other governing group that moderates these rules? Who is it that takes action if they see unfair use of a material?