Can I publish this?

In my previous post I wrote about how the Internet doesn´t consider your point of veiw when it comes to things you publish. Once you´ve published something, you can´t take it back. Things get shared and copied around, and just about anything have a backup online. So we should really think twice over the things we put out there.

This blog post will look at it from another angel. There is actually some rules about what we can and can´t share. We´re not allowed to do whatever we want, although it might seem like it most of the time. You´ve probably herd about Copyright. Copyrights is one of four ways to protect Intellectual property.
The picture below I found from Flickr that´s  a services include a CC-image portal where images are offered under a Creative Commons license. This picture I borrowed from Mikes blog.
 

So what is Copyright? It´s not so easy to explain, but copyrights protect works of authorship, such as writings, music, and works of art that have been tangibly expressed. The Library of Congress registers copyrights which last the life of the author plus 50 years.

Generally, it is "the right to copy", but also gives the copyright holder the right to be credited for the work, to determine who may adapt the work to other forms, who may perform the work, who may financially benefit from it, and other related rights. It is an intellectual property form (like the patent, the trademark, and the trade secret) applicable to any expressible form of an idea or information that is substantive and discrete.

If the protected material is being used contrary to the provisions the owner may claim compensation, confiscation, etc. of illegal copies of works and stopping illegal activities.You can also get punishment by fines and prison. This provision is an important part of the statutory balance between author's rights and public interests. The rule on copying for personal use are for yourself, your family and close friends.

So, in other words, it´s allowed to copy from the web for private use, but many people doesn´t know that it´s not allowed to take for example a picture or video from the web, and publish it somewhere else without special permission.

Once it´s published, you can´t take it back

This blog will wiew my thoughts about information privacy.

Culture is a comprehensive term, and it can be explained in different ways. Culture can be defined as shared ideas, values​​, attitudes, rules, habits and traditions. How does the information society effect our culture?

The alarm clock rings early in the morning, and we´re waking up to a new day. We sit at the breakfast table, eating and reading news on the web. Then we proceed to school and work. At school the education starts with a PowerPoint presentation that´s full of nice pictures, videos maybe, animations, links and so on. Later in the day we´re headed to our work after school. We´re listening to music and radio on our cell phones, and maybe we check the latest news on Facebook through Internet.

The computer is the answer to the technology age, just as the mechanism was the answer to the industrial revolution. The technology is everywhere, and there is no doubt that it´s changing our culture, our habits and our thinking around peoples private lives. Now a days almost anything get published on the Internet. My grandparents can´t wrap their heads around why some people will share private photos on the Internet for everyone to see, when you most likely wouldn´t even show them in your own livingroom. I can relate to their thinking, but there is a lot of people who don´t.

This article in tv2.no shows that the young Facebook-users is more conserned about their private information then we´re giving them credit for. I think young people who grow up in this new Internet-world now a days is quite enlightened about how they can protect their information privacy, but there will always be those who don´t think about these aspects as much.

The Internet is a big world with a lot of information. It´s hard to know how to protect your own information privacy, and still be able to use the Internet as a tool for sharing things you like with the people you know. As I pointed out above, there is probably a big number of Internet-users who doesn´t think about their information privacy before it´s to late. Once you´ve published something on the Internet, you can´t take it back. The video below show us how this works, and can give us all a wake-up-call about this topic.

A girl loose control of her picture

Social sites and other attention stealers in the classroom

In our school many of the pupils have access to their own personal computers, and there is also a couple of computers in every classroom that is available for them to use. The internet access is good, and we try to use this tool as often we can to support the digital learning.

The problem is this: The pupils often get distracted from the education because it´s so easy for them to "log in" to other internet sites, especially social sites as Facebook. The pupils are faced forward in the classroom, and the computers are therfore faced the other way. This makes it difficult to get a good overwiew of what the pupils are doing on their computers. Another factor is that we have a big prosentage of pupils who need their computers to write notes during the lessons.

So, what can we do to change this trend? Should we continue using PCs in our education?

PROs

• The pupils have lots of benefits by using their computers at school. 
• They can easily write notes and have a good system by making files to each topic. 
• Access to any sort of information is unlimited.
• Sharing notes with other classmates is easy.
• Deliver assignments to the teacher is easy. 
• The difference between pupils with special needs and the rest of the class will even out. 

CONs

• A traditional classroom is not satisfying when it comes to use of PC among the pupils.
• The classroom ned to change if the teachers is going to have a good overview of the work. 
• It takes time to teach good rules aboute use of PC in the education. 
• Some pupils will allways take advantege of access to attention stealers if they exist

We can´t cut the use of computers in the education, that´s like jumping back in time. The ICT is here to stay, and we need to find a way to make it work without loosing valuble time in the education. If I look farward in time, I understand that computers and other techologies will take more space in our education. Another aspect is that my PROs-list is bigger than my CONs-list. So I think that we probably need to establish some ground rules and follow up with consequence if someone brakes these rules. Maybe a consequense can be that we confiscate the PC, or some sort of a joint punishment. What do you think?

ICT - a challenge or a tool at school?

I want to write about what implications information and communication technologies has on education. I will focus on the information we gather from the Internet, and how this affects students in an educational environment. I will also discuss what challenges the teachers face regarding to this topic, and how the society relate to this.

I´m a frequent user of the Internet at my work as a teacher, my studies and in my freetime. I consider myself to be normally updated in ICT, but I also know that ICT evolves rapidly. We need to update ourselves, especially if we are going to use it in our work in education. ICT is so easy to use when you know how, but not if you don´t.

I think young students habits are very similar to ours, and to find out more about students use of the Internet I have studied some of the results of the PISA program of 2000 and 2006. Research showed that the use of search engines increased from 27 percent in 2000 to 42 percent in 2006. This confirms that students use of the Internet is increasing quickly, and 6 years after this study I´m sure that the percentage is a lot higher than 42 percent.

This means that the students need new skills to assess the information they gather from the Internet, and they need to learn how to find the "good" ones, and how to neglect the "bad" ones. From my school practice during my own study in Tromsø, I got a good insight into how hard this could be for some students. When they were working on school tasks, some of them read text at too high a level and some spent lots of time on pages that were unreliable. Another thing that surprised me was how much the students were dependent on the Internet. The students started to work on a project while I was there. For the first hour they were without Internet access and this frustrated some of the groups a lot. They said they could not only use their textbooks. 

During another practice at primary school I was lucky to be able to teach in a class where they used a high level of ICT in the classroom. It was very easy to see how much the children enjoyed playing games whilst learning on the whiteboard , learning new letters on it, reading a digital version of a textbook or use their own computer. You could tell how it caught their attention straight away. At my curent workplace we don´t have all this tools to use in the classroom, and I can clearly see a big difference in the technology skills among the students.

Several key people talks about how ICT 

can benefit our teaching and improve schools by learning the pupils to be critical to ICT. 

The video above show us something very important. The digital technology hits home before school, it's everywhere and we have to keep up with it as teachers. Like Peter Rudd says in the video, the new technology is involving and engaging students. When young people go online they are met by an information stream that tries to reach them through videos, animations, chat, illustrations, music and photos. We need to get through to the students in the same way, we need to reach out to their world as best we can. Another topic they talk about is the benefits we can have in our work around each pupil using technology to gather information in one place.

I now work in a school that have several teachers who is soon to be retired. One of them is working under me at the moment, and I observe every day how he struggles to keep up with the technology surrounding him. He often have troubles with different tasks at his computer, and this week we got new Ipads for the students to use in our education. This is something he probably never´s going to learn. It´s a problem for all the other teachers in his team because we need to do work he´s not able to, or use our time trying to teach him how.

I think it´s a huge challenge for the society to regularly educate teachers so they´re updated enough to deal with the "ICT world" as it´s evolves. How can we expect the students to use and gather information from ICT, if we can´t use it properly? And is it right that "everything" they do needs to be on a computer?

Personally I think the information and communication technology is a good tool in education, but I also think that both students and teachers need to learn how to use it. As I observed in my practice, the internet can be a real challenge instead of the solution for some students.

This is me

Hi, my name is Helene. I`m 25 years old, and live in northern Norway.

This is my first blog in english, and I´m a little rusty. I have blogged earlier about my life in general, but this blog will be dedicated to my studies dealing with ICT in society and worklife. I will write about social and cultural aspects of ICT (information and communication technologies). But first I need to update myself a little. 


I´ll be back :)