Turning Digital Natives into Digital Citizens

Today’s K–12 students are commonly called “digital natives” because they have grown up with digital technology. But natives can run wild, using the Internet to (wittingly or unwittingly) plagiarize others’ work or bully peers using social media.

Now, educators are teaching digital natives how to become good digital citizens. As defined by federal officials in the recently released National Education Technology Plan and by educators in the National Educational Technology Standards for Students (NETS), model digital citizens “practice safe, legal, and ethical use of digital information and tools.” While cyberbullying remains a concern, teachers are helping students investigate the weighty issue of intellectual property rights in order to keep them within legal and ethical bounds. Using websites as well as their own tools, they are helping students understand important concepts such as fair use and copyright, and are also helping them see the relevance in these topics by learning how to protect their own digital work.

Playing Fair with Fair Use
So far this century, educators have battled the plagiarism endemic to a wired world much the way medieval villagers resisted the plague: with preaching and quarantining of websites and student work. Sites such as Turnitin.com—which compares electronically submitted student work with a huge text database to see if the work is copied—have blossomed to fight the trend.

The problem of ethical use goes beyond plagiarism, however. Even when properly credited, not all published work can be used in another work. Student-made productions, like glogs and blogs that combine digital media, must still meet so-called fair use tests. Fair use of copyrighted work is allowed if the new work (e.g., a student online video presentation using clips from film versions of Romeo and Juliet) incorporates the film in a way that substantially differs from the original intent and value of the older work—the law phrases this as ‘transforming’ the original work. Another concern is whether the amount of the work used (for example, brief clips of a movie versus large sections of it) is appropriate to this new use.

Because there are so many ways for students to create their own works online, many educators see a teachable moment: along with producing media, students can also learn how to protect the media they produce. The hope is that the instruction builds understanding of copyright laws governing others’ works, and equally, of how plagiarism damages authors in the real world, including the students themselves.

“The idea is, students are authors,” says Renee Hobbs, a professor and founder of Temple University’s Media Education Lab, and author of Digital and Media Literacy: Connecting Culture and Classroom (Corwin Press). “[And] when you’re an author, you have a responsibility to think through how to use your work, [you’re] not just a user” of books, films, and music in pursuit of academic studies, she observes. With others, Hobbs has developed an online primer and a critical reasoning tool to help students and teachers figure out whether their use of a copyrighted work constitutes fair use. The tool works by posing a series of questions about the student’s proposed work, and then automatically feeding the answers into a spreadsheet, allowing the students to see how their work would be judged against the factors that govern the fair use standard.

In a Chicago suburb, American Studies teacher Spiro Bolos teaches the concept of fair use as a prequel to requiring his students to blog about the course. “Their post must use [media] in a transformative way to meet the fair use test,” says Bolos. “They [also] have to ask themselves whether that purpose is different than the one they are using it for.” As a resource, Bolos directs his students at New Trier Township High School to Hobb’s critical reasoning tool.

Creative Commons: The “Game-Changer”
Teachers are also finding help from Creative Commons, a non-profit organization, that offers an array of licenses for creative work that may have originated in digital or traditional formats (i.e., on paper, video, audiotape, or film). Traditionally, copyrighted works, such as books, music, and film, reserve all rights of ownership to the owner—hence the ubiquitous “all rights reserved” included in copyright statements. But the ease with which digital media can be obtained, copied, and reused in new ways has led to efforts to update this scheme. Creative Commons offers a range of different ways to license one’s work, from allowing its free use in any medium to allowing use in non-commercial situations only to requiring payment for its use.

Andrew Marcinek, an instructional technologist and a teacher at suburban Burlington High School outside Boston, calls Creative Commons a “game-changer.” To teach students how to use Creative Commons licenses to protect their own work, Marcinek had students in his English class take pictures for their blogs, and then choose and create a license for those pictures. He scaffolds the license process by walking students through licenses on the Creative Commons website (above) and other online resources. Then, students upload their pictures to a class pictures page that Marcinek has established on Flickr (since the website allows users to select a Creative Commons license when uploading). With the pictures properly licensed, students can post them on their blogs with proper attribution to the Flickr page as well.

Marcinek, who also teaches a ninth-grade elective on digital media, also likes the preloaded music on ccmixter.com (above) because the content is already licensed through Creative Commons to allow downloading and sampling. An images site he likes, CompFight.com, is useful for helping students find pictures that are available for use under various Creative Commons licenses, and for teaching them about the different levels of permission, and—of course—about being an upstanding digital citizen.

Dave Saltman is a writer and teacher in the Los Angeles area. He is a contributor to Spotlight on Technology in Education.