MAC Week 1: Coment to Jennifer's Blog

Wayne Nelson said...

Agreed, Jennifer, CC is the bridge to the future. As educators, we have a responsibility to make sure that our students are well-informed citizens, and that they are provided with the proper instruction that will aid them in creating lawful works of art. As always, thank you for your insight.
October 28, 2011 11:46 AM

Media Asset Creation: Copyright Issues
Thank goodness for Ted talks. Watching these hours worth of copyright issue videos was enough to make a teacher quit her job. So, rather than dwell on the extremes that many of these videos did, I want to focus on the little bit of hope I found within the creative commons information and within Larry Lessig’s TED talk.
Lessig quoted John Phillips Souza in 1906 who said that these “talking machines” referring to radios will ruin the artistic development in this country. And, in fact, the 20th century became a culture of “read only” people. However the 21st century seems to be assuming artistic development again. Thanks to the $1500 computer, the tools of creativity have become tools of speech. It is what the next generation bases its life upon. Yet, Lessig insists, the law has not greeted this revival with very much common sense. It prohibits to such an extreme degree that legal creativity becomes stifled, at best.
Creative Commons offers possibilities and hope and does in fact seem to be a “bridge to the future”. This will begin our journey to thinking more about communities and less about content. However, in the meantime, educators have to find a way to give our students the tools and information they need to legally create, express, and use the digital technologies that are available to them.