e-portfolio 511

Copyright issues are a hot debate item at many universities at the moment. Intellectual property, another hot button word keeps popping up.  The internet has changed and blurred our current copyright laws. Once something is put on the internet it is in the public domain so the expectation must be there that huge numbers of users will read, quote and share what is up there.
Current copyright laws were meant to be applied to print materials, as that is the era in which they were written. It is difficult to apply these same laws to digital property. Larry Lessig’s keynote presentation at Educause (2009) was my initial introduction to Creative Commons. This presentation is well worth watching if you haven’t seen it already.
Creative Commons enables authors of content to license their work with the uses they intended the work to have and bypasses the expensive, time consuming restrictions of current copyright laws. The intent of CC puts the power back into the hands of authors of content enabling them to maintain rights and privileges to their intellectual property under their terms.
Liang on the other hand appears to lean more towards to open access philosophy, freeing all cyberspace users and putting content into the public domain. Both agree that copyright laws are out dated and that changes need to be made in our new digital culture however their approach is different.
I am more of the Lessig mindset and support the CC approach to digital content and intellectual property.

In Clark’s (1994), “Media will never Influence Learning” his argument appears to be that media is simply the vehicle to deliver the content and has no impact on student motivation or learning. The active ingredient is the instructional methods used to activate student learning. He states that no one media or media attribute causes learning to occur, that the Instructional designers choice of media for delivery should be based on 2 factors; cost effectiveness and efficiency. Clark also states that with the scarcity of educational dollars and the expense of technology the focus should be on the instructional methods and not on finding, buying new technology if learning does not occur with current technology.

Kozma’s(1994), “Will Media Influence Learning? Reframing the Debate”, on the other hand states that learning is an active process of knowledge construction. Learners connect prior knowledge with new knowledge to construct new learning. Media is key to activating prior knowledge and helping learners construct meaningful representations of abstract concepts. These representations are internalized over time to become part of the learners’ cognitive processes. Kozma supports the need for further research into how media interacts with and influences learning. Instructional designers can then design interventions to embed the most effective media into the processes of knowledge construction.

I do believe, much like Clark, that cost effectiveness and efficiency are important factors given the economic climate of today’s schools. The newest, most expensive technology is not necessarily going to improve student learning. However I also agree with Kozma’s belief that learning is an interactive process and that the use of media enables learners to build background knowledge, provides representations and facilitates active learning. I teach in an inner city school which services students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Students lack the experiences with the world and have very little background knowledge upon which to connect new learning. The use of media in my classroom has facilitated the building of background knowledge, has allowed students to interact with the content in ways that were not open to them using traditional classroom methods. I view the use of Media in my classroom as an instructional strategy, one way to differentiate instruction to meet the needs of my students.

As I read through the assigned readings I could not help but notice that the definitions grew and changed over time, changing to accommodate an ever growing field of study. I really had not thought much about the history of ET before this. I think the definition of ET will continue to evolve as technology advances are made. This is such an exciting time. I think the rapid growth and sophistication of technology available and its easy accessibility makes it necessary to constantly re evaluate and reflect on its uses, and impact on society which will in turn have implications for defining ET.