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technical know-how is not enough. We must also be adept at negotiating, planning, and nurturing the conversation with others we may know little about -- not to mention maintaining a healthy balance between our face-to-face and virtual lives (another dance for which kids sorely need coaching).

The Collaboration Age comes with challenges that often cause concern and fear. How do we manage our digital footprints, or our identities, in a world where we are a Google search away from both partners and predators? What are the ethics of co-creation when the nuances of copyright and intellectual property become grayer each day? When connecting and publishing are so easy, and so much of what we see is amateurish and inane, how do we ensure that what we create with others is of high quality?

Students are growing networks without us, writing Harry Potter narratives together at FanFiction.net, or trading skateboarding videos on YouTube. At school, we disconnect them not only from the technology but also from their passion and those who share it.

The complexities of editing information online cannot be sequestered and taught in a six-week unit. This has to be the way we do our work each day.

The process of collaboration begins with our willingness to share our work and our passions publicly -- a frontier that traditional schools have rarely crossed.

Look no further than Wikipedia to see the potential; say what you will of its veracity, no one can deny that it represents the incredible potential of working with others online for a common purpose.

The technologies we block in their classrooms flourish in their bedrooms

Anyone with a passion for something can connect to others with that same passion -- and begin to co-create and colearn the same way many of our students already do.

I believe that is what educators must do now. We must engage with these new technologies and their potential to expand our own understanding and methods in this vastly different landscape. We must know for ourselves how to create, grow, and navigate these collaborative spaces in safe, effective, and ethical ways. And we must be able to model those shifts for our students and counsel them effectively when they run across problems with these tools.

Permission is not necessary to satisfy fair use.

Fair use is a doctrine within copyright law that allows use of copyrighted material for educational purposes without permission from the the owners or creators. It is designed to balance rights of users with the rights of owners by encouraging widespread and flexible use of cultural products for the purposes of education and the advancement of knowledge.

My new understanding: I learned on Friday night that the critical test for fairness in terms of educational use of media is transformative use. When a user of copyrighted materials adds value to, or repurposes materials for a use different from that for which it was originally intended, it will likely be considered transformative use; it will also likely be considered fair use. Fair use embraces the modifying of existing media content, placing it in new context.  Examples of transformativeness might include: using campaign video in a lesson exploring media strategies or rhetoric, using music videos to explore such themes as urban violence, using commercial advertisements to explore messages relating to body image or the various different ways beer makers sell beer, remixing a popular song to create a new artistic expression.

Long ago, I learned that educational use of media had to pass four tests to be appropriate and fair according to U.S. Code Title 17 107: the purpose and character of the use, including whether the use is commercial or nonprofit the nature of the use the amount of the use the effect of the use on the potential market for the copyrighted work.

--A Conversation about Media Literacy, Copyright and Fair Use--stirred up more cognitive disonance than I've experienced in years

the discussion was one of several to be held around the country designed to clear up widespread confusion and to: develop a shared understanding of how copyright and fair use applies to the creative media work that our students create and our own use of copyrighted materials as educators, practitioners, advocates and curriculum developers.

national code of practice

Jaszi points to Bill Graham Archives vs.Dorling Kindersley (2006) as a clear example of how courts liberally interpret fair use even with a commercial publisher.

The publisher added value in its use of the posters. And such use was transformative.

Here's what I think I learned on Friday about fair use: The Multimedia Fair Use Guidelines describe minimum rules for fair use, but were never intended as specific rules or designed to exhaust the universe of educational practice.  They were meant as a dynamic, rather than static doctrine, supposed to expand with time, technology, changes in practice.  Arbitrary rules regarding proportion or time periods of use (for instance, 30-second or 45-day rules) have no legal status.  The fact that permission has been sought but not granted is irrelevant.  Permission is not necessary to satisfy fair use. Fair use is fair use without regard to program or platform. What is fair, because it is transformative, is fair regardless of place of use. If a student has repurposed and added value to copyrighted material, she should be able to use it beyond the classroom (on YouTube, for instance) as well as within it.  Not every student use of media is fair, but many uses are. One use not likely to be fair, is the use of a music soundtrack merely as an aesthetic addition to a student video project. Students need to somehow recreate to add value.  Is the music used simply a nice aesthetic addition or does the new use give the piece different meaning? Are students adding value, engaging the music, reflecting, somehow commenting on.the music? Not everything that is rationalized as educationally beneficial is necessarily fair use.  For instance, photocopying a text book because it is not affordable is still not fair use.

Copyright law is friendlier to good teaching than many teachers now realize. Fair use is like a muscle that needs to be exercised.  People can't exercise it in a climate of fear and uncertainty