Category Archives: D: Copyright

The digital footprint has huge implications for medical professionals. There are many instances where a students/residents/staff have posted things on social media sites that clearly demonstrated unprofessional behaviour and have been reprimanded for it. Below are just two examples I know of:

http://globalnews.ca/news/2471465/miami-doctor-suspended-after-being-caught-on-camera-abusing-uber-driver/

http://globalnews.ca/news/1755000/dalhousie-to-make-statement-about-response-to-offensive-facebook-comments/

The above examples are an important reminder that anything we post on the internet, even though it’s “private, or invitation-only” can become public down the road. As professionals in this digital era, we need to maintain professionalism digitally and personally.

Apparently, some medical schools are looking at digital footprints as part of the admissions process. Although this is still quite controversial.

On the flip side, our footprints can have a huge influence on health literacy and dissemination of health information to the public. For example, for the conditions that I deal with such as urinary incontinence and pelvic organ prolapse, many people don’t seek help because they attribute these conditions to “natural aging” and because they are too embarrassed to seek help. It may also be attributed to the lack of knowledge regarding treatment options. But effective use of social media can help us reach patients and given them reliable information.

As far as I know, our medical school does not teach on digital literacy, digital professionalism or topics surrounding digital footprints. I think these are vital topics that I am currently learning “on the fly”. We are definitely NOT doing enough for our students regarding this topic. I hope that we can implement these topics to teach our students to use social media and digital information correctly, responsibly and professionally. I guess I better go make a meeting with our curriculum committee!

Hi Everyone;

Excuse the whining here. I am actually very grateful for this module because for the past few years, I have been responsible for seeking copyright permission for a few large publication projects. Everything I know about copyright, I’ve had to learn on my own with very little assistance.

Oh, how I wish everything could be found on iStock! I have spent weeks searching for clinical images for specific medical or dental conditions. When I do find some appropriate images 75% of the time,  they are owned by a monopoly organization called Elsevier. They charge a fortune and have ridiculous restrictions that don’t help at all in this age of open educational resources. My director recently published an article in a publication they owned. She had the option of making her article an open resource. However, there was a catch. She would have to pay the $4000 for the privilege. She was the author, she was making no money on the publication of her article, but if she wanted others to use it freely, she had to pay upfront. This is definitely not in the spirit of ‘Fair Dealing’.

The dilemma we regularly face is that we want to publish our courses on a website not managed by the University of Manitoba. Consequently, most ‘fair dealing’ privileges described by UBC do not apply to us. We have to get transactional consent to republish an image and this can be very tricky and very time consuming.

Reference:

UBC Copyright. Fair Dealing in Practice. Retrieved from http://copyright6.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2015/04/Fair-Dealing-in-Practice-v-1-0-2015.pdf

I briefly discussed when I first became concerned about my digital footprint in my last post. However, I didn’t really take charge of it until I taught digital citizenship (using Creative Commons resources) to my very first class five years ago. To demonstrate a digital footprint, I Googled myself in front of the class (not before doing it in the privacy of my office first.) I didn’t imagine anything would turn up–I had changed all of my social media accounts to private during university and I didn’t post much online. However, when we got to page three of the Google image search, there was my picture! We clicked on the link and found it was from my hometown newspaper–but it was a personal photo that my mother had taken of me when I carried the Olympic flame. It had been posted on Facebook at one point, but I had since untagged it. I was quite upset, but I used it as a learning moment for my class. We talked about how we could go about having it taken down and, as a class, we decided I should email the editor directly and ask for it to be removed immediately. As soon as class ended I rushed to my office and typed an email requesting that the photo be removed from the website immediately. Two weeks later–no response. So I emailed again, this time asking how they had gotten a personal picture of mine in the first place. Again, no response. About a month later, the photo was removed, but I never received a response. My best guess as to how they managed to get the photo is that they found it before I untagged it and changed my privacy settings. Additionally, if it had been shared, or my mom’s privacy settings weren’t as high, it would have been easy for it to have been found by anyone. This is what is so unsettling about digital footprints–you really don’t have much control at all.

This lack of control is why teaching digital citizenship is so important. My students snap pictures, make videos, and post an immense amount of content online with barely a second thought. They aren’t thinking about the future yet, so it’s my job to educate them on how to make responsible choices, how to be safe, and how to behave online. I say my job because I am their IT teacher, but any subject teacher could and should teach digital citizenship. We can’t and shouldn’t police their every move, but we can help them be aware of the consequences, both positive and negative, of posting online. It’s not only students who need to be careful. From administrators checking out potential candidates (like Kate mentioned in her post), to colleagues Googling each other, online postings are not considered off limits. However, I wonder if there is a line between “invasion of privacy” and “you posted publicly on the Internet so it’s fair game”?

Intellectual property in China–what a huge topic to delve into. I know there must be some sort of copyright law, but, if there is, it doesn’t seem to be followed and my school does not seem to have a Fair Dealings policy. Plagarism is common at our school and the students generally don’t see a problem with it. The students don’t seem to have a sense of intellectual property–even when it’s their own intellectual property. I often catch students copying a classmate’s work and when I return the work to the classmate, they often reply that they were just sharing.  I also see a difference in how the Canadian teaching department and the Chinese teaching department handle plagarism and intellectual property. The Canadian teachers tend to come down hard and deem it unacceptable when students copy or fail to acknowledge sources. The Chinese department acknowledges it is wrong, but tend to be more forgiving. However, as I am not a member of the Chinese department, I’m not sure what they teach or suggest to their students. It’s possible that there is some instruction happening–I’m just not aware of it.

I can comment on a shortfall in how the Canadian teaching department approaches teaching students about intellecual property. As I mentioned above, the Canadian teaching department comes down hard on plagarism. However, students only learn the MLA citation guidelines in grade 12 during the research essay unit, so I think we’re being a little unfair. To help ease the tension, I’m introducing acknowledging image sources in my presentations unit this year. I put it off for a long time because I thought it would be too difficult to communicate to my classes. However, while I know this task is going to be difficult because it’s something new and challenging for the students, (although, thanks to Parm’s post I have some new resources to use) I know it’s important to do, even though it’s difficult. I know that the acknowledgements won’t be perfect, but if I can get the students in the habit of looking for the original source and documenting it, it could get them thinking about it in their other courses. It’s a small step, but it’s small and deliberate step in the right direction.

On a professional level, I am deeply concerned about my own intellectual property and how it’s being used. As my family of schools expands, I am repeatedly asked to share resources I have created with the IT teachers at the other schools. I do not like sharing resources I have created because I doubt that I’m acknowledged as the original creator and I can’t control how the resources are shared after they leave my hands. Additionally, I spend a lot of time revising the resources I have created, and I worry that the other IT teachers may not be revising what they have received from me to reflect changes in classroom demographics, technology, or even simple thngs like references to popular culture. So, if I am, by chance, acknowledged as the source, I may be acknowledged as a source of outdated material. However, I always share it when asked because I feel guilty if I do not. Does anyone else have these feelings?

I have always been more of a private person so did not really spend much time trying to share things publically on the internet. I have periodically done a Google search of myself to see what shows up and as Colleen mentioned in her posts I am more mindful of the digital footprint left for the purpose of employment.

Physiotherapy students under my mentorship are an easier audience to address the issue of digital footprint. Patients who are under my guidance are receptive to information pertaining to their own rehabilitation but in terms of their activity on the internet it becomes more of a challenging. The education revolves more around health literacy when reading information on the internet. I encourage patients to consider the source of the information they are reading and if the author may have secondary motives to gain from the information they have presented.

Our program has recently encountered a case where an injured worker who was suppose to be off work posted pictures of herself attending baseball games and other social events on Facebook. This led the workers compensation board to initiate an investigation into her claim and its legitimacy. In this case, I am not certain what our team’s position would be in terms of educating this patient on what digital footprint she is leaving. It is interesting how in this case, it is not young students who need to learn about their digital footprint but adults.

I do not believe intellectual property is viewed the same with every culture. Certain cultures do not see copying a product to be an issue because they are dealing with much greater socio-economical issues such as low wages and poverty. It really depends on what your life situation is at the moment and your own personal challenges to some degree. At other times, it comes down to money. If someone is benefiting off of something that you have created then the stakes become much higher. An example of this is the lawsuit against Pharrell Williams and Allan Thicke for copyright infringements on their song Blurred Lines. This ties in nicely to last weeks topic on social media 🙂

In terms of teaching, I would need to be more conscious to not make any assumptions when dealing with a multicultural class. I need to ask direct questions about how perspectives may differ in their own cultures so that they can make sense of the concept of copyright in a North American educational system.

That’s how it feels to try and teach copyright issues to my students, most of the time.  Many of them who came from other countries reported having zero awareness that copyright law even existed, for most of them it was like re-training them to understand the importance of avoiding plagiarism.  In some cases, especially for the students from China (and I will be interested to hear about Meghan has to say about this), they had been told that the only thing that mattered was the right answer, and where it came didn’t really matter.   Like I said, head -> wall.

However it’s come to my attention recently that I’m no copyright saint, either.  Although I strive to follow a set of rules similar to UBC’s ‘Fair Dealings’ policies, I know I’ve fudged that ‘10% allowance’ when using resources once or twice, especially when I needed to use a textbook that didn’t have enough copies for every student.  I also love finding sources, whether visual or text, to incorporate into my courses, but I haven’t always been the best at citing them – this is something I’ve become more aware of recently and plan on being much more disciplined around, to be a better model for my students.  Even though teaching them how to cite an online image can be a test of one’s saintliness, I need to make it clear to them the importance of abiding property laws.

For a very long time I didn’t heed my parents’ warnings about the internet ‘never forgetting’, and considered it a fairly anonymous place.  In recent years I’ve been learning just how misguided that is, although thankfully not because of any personal experiences or run-ins with the law.  It hit home in a big way one day when my Principal told me she was screening some of the teachers she had interviewed online, seeking them out on Facebook and other social sites.  Now my digital footprint is almost entirely ‘professional’, or mundane enough that it wouldn’t prove incriminating.  It feels like more than ever my students are creating vastly connected worlds online, many with the illusion of anonymity or impermanence, but just as my parents said years ago about Facebook can be said now about Snapchat – the internet never forgets.

The Digital Tattoo site is something I could see using to try and increase conversation with my classes in the future, to open up discussions about copyright and the possibilities and pitfalls of using the internet.  As of yet I haven’t had the opportunity to take on this endeavour with students born in Canada, where they will have (hopefully) heard the narrative around academic integrity throughout their schooling – but perhaps some of my classmates will have experience in how this tends to go!  Thankfully there are plenty of online resources available now, including Plagiarism.org, TurnItIn.com’s free resources (including this excellent run-down of the 10 most commons forms of plagiarism), and plenty of articles about people caught in the act.  I would like to think that with discussion, teaching of skills, and peer-and-self checks (along with high standards kept by me) students will learn how to avoid the common errors around plagiarism – and hopefully even understand the moral implications of it, too.  Perhaps it’s a maturity issue, perhaps we all assume we’ll never be the one to get caught – but whatever it is, it’s going to be worth integrating into our teaching more than ever.

End note: At my parent’s home last year I picked up this copy of the Walrus, that featured an article about what it called the ‘plagiarism epidemic’ in Canada’s universities.  I don’t have enough confidence to recite it, and it looks like you have to buy the issue to read it, but if any of you come across it, it was a good read!

Being involved in creating learning materials for so many years, I am very aware of copyright and “digital footprint”. Copyright has been an issue since photocopying materials became common, and the online world has complicated it even more. It’s something that often gets overlooked, especially since instructors add videos, images, readings and other elements they come across online, into their teaching as the course progresses. Most often received course content from instructors, or instructional designers which is full of copied and pasted images from the Internet. There seems to be a perception that if it’s online – then is open game. This is slowly changing, and most educational institutions have library staff who can help figure out copyright issues, and provide guidance. In my experience I’ve found their expertise to be indispensable!

One thing that is useful to do, is to model behaviour expected from students in the course materials. For example, if I use an image in a course, I make sure to cite the source and creative commons license in the course. In the academic courses, where students are expected to use APA or MLA, I will use that in the course as well. Even when permission has been granted to use an image or other content I make sure to credit the source.

Since images are most problematic in my experience, I try to use the Flickr Creative Commons licensed images,  MorgueFile  images, or google image searches filtered by usage rights. Finding images is not so hard, but it can be cumbersome to properly attribute the source. For this I use ImageCodr to speed things up. (See my e-portfolio blog post for details on how to do this.) And another online tool I find useful for finding the sources of those mysterious images that show up in instructor PowerPoints is called TinEye. You just upload the image, to do a reverse image search.

Culture

Culture does impact views on intellectual property. In cultures that are less individualistic, and more collaborative, the students often work on assignments together. This “borrowing of ideas” can be viewed as cheating or plagiarism by others. For example in Punjabi folk songs, the melody is “borrowed” from an other musician, and new lyrics are crafted and added into the old. Often the new lyrics will include a reference to the original song or songwriter as a respectful acknowledgement in the new rendition. As no one “steals” from bad musicians, in a way it compliments the musician whose ideas were taken and developed. This is really different than what is mainstream. Consider the famous copyright infringement case between Queen/David Bowie and Vanilla Ice.

The “digital footprint” or, as others call it – “digital tattoo”, is something that I’ve been aware of for some time. It really started becoming apparent when I was enrolled in my Bachelor of Education program at UBC: there was a presentation at least once a semester with a tone of fear behind it. Each session contained warnings of students who were denied teaching certificates or educators fired from jobs for seemingly minor things they had posted online. One such example was a student from New York who was denied the awarding of her teaching certificate from her university for a photo on her MySpace. She was holding a red Solo cup with the word “Pirate” etched onto it (one of those write-on cups), and was wearing a pirate hat folded out of regular white paper. You couldn’t even see the contents of the cup! To this day I wonder if that story was made up to incite fear into our social media use. I guess I could Google it and probably find out, but I haven’t.

As I entered teaching, I was less cautious than my UBC colleagues but I did take precautions to lock down Facebook and other media. Some of my friends went as far as deleting and/or “hiding” the entirety of their photos from public view – even from their friend connections online. Later, when I joined Twitter, I held the attitude that the media had to host only professional content, and nothing personal. Over time, I realized that forging professional relationships has a personal element, and I began to share a little bit more about my life. It also helped that I found my fiancé through that very network; my personal life got to be pretty known to those people I was trying so hard to hide it from in the first place! Now, I share some of my Instagram photography openly, posting it to my Twitter account selectively, but I still keep my Facebook pretty locked up, even though I have many professional contacts there, too. Most of my photos are of travel, hikes, natural beauty, or family, but my fiancé and I are craft beer enthusiasts, so that gets snuck in every once in awhile.

When considering students, we constantly have conversations about digital citizenship and the impact of what they post online. I’ll reiterate here what Keri stated in her post – it isn’t a single unit of study, it needs to be an ongoing conversation. Personally, I use snippets from Common Sense Media’s Scope & Sequence (2016) as well as Media Smarts (2016) to inform my digital citizenship curriculum. As I shared in my post last week, I use a lot of social media and blogging in my classroom, and teach digital citizenship through actual use of the media. For example, lessons such as Paper Blogging provide great scaffolding for online conversations through commentary.  

Even though my students are really young, I start working with them on image copyright and appropriate citations. Since asking them to format citations in APA is a bit much, I often ask them to provide a website list to me (they also learn keyboard shortcuts REALLY fast this way!). Additionally, I show them how to cite images and what kinds of images they can actually legally use. We use physical theft as an analogy to using copyrighted images or plagiarizing websites online. This is a very difficult concept for them, and we’re not perfect at it by any means. If I had to improve in one area, it would be this one – even though my students are only 8 and 9.

References

Common Sense Media. (2016). Scope & Sequence: Common Sense K-12 Digital Citizenship Curriculum. Retrieved from https://www.commonsensemedia.org/educators/scope-and-sequence

Media Smarts. (2016). Digital & Media Literacy. Retrieved from http://mediasmarts.ca/digital-media-literacy  

The first time I heard the term “digital footprint” was in high school. Everyone was getting cellphones, webcams, and digital cameras. We were moving from MySpace to Facebook and MSN Messenger to Skype. I remember a few teachers warning us to be careful about what we post online because of “predators”. As we got older (and more familiar with social media) the fear of the predator subsided and the fear of the potential employer took over. It was becoming common practice for employers to look you up online before hiring you. In high school this was not a big concern but in university it certainly was. I had a lot of friends change their screenname so they would not come up in a Google search. I personally, do not use my last name on my social media accounts (with the exception of LinkedIn). I think this is very common practice now but is still an important message to relay to students.

Intellectual Property and Privacy are not new concepts to me. I actually feel like I have a slight advantage in these areas simply because I work at a law firm with a large Intellectual Property practice and Privacy speciality group. Needless to say we have to ensure we are upholding IP and privacy regulations in order to represent our clients. The law is a hard thing to “copy”, after all it is absolute and written by a governing body. You cannot really claim that the regulations are your own and the information is publically accessible. It is common place to reference case law or statues in our programs. In our case, sharing knowledge is more so sharing precedent documents or best practices – all of which are owned by the Firm so no firm member is violating copyright by using them. Where you can get in trouble is trying to use these resources once you have left the firm.

I do not think every culture has the same views on intellectual property – I don’t even think the same cultures have the same views on intellectual property. For example many people would see no issue with playing music (that you purchased) at an event or conference. However, legally you are supposed to obtain a SOCAN license if you are playing music for business purposes. Buying the music only allows you to play it for private use.  It would be very easy for someone unfamiliar with copyright law to violate this regulation regardless of their cultural background. Where does the onus fall to educate people on copyright? I’m not sure I have the answer. I would think it would be industry specific, so perhaps in college, university, or workplace onboarding.