Net Smart

After reading Net Smart by Howard Rheingold, I would say this book encompasses everything we have been discussing these past few weeks. I felt that it was closely linked to Information Diet. Rheingold mentions five literacies, attention, crap detection, participation, collaboration and network smarts. With each, he goes into great detail and gives several examples of them.  The one that stands out to me is attention  because it’s something I feel I deal with every day. My middle school is a 1 to 1 program and every time the kids walk through my door and sit down they immediately open their Chromebooks. I find myself saying each time they walk in ‘Chromebooks are closed”. Even when I have them working on an assignment with the Chromebooks, if I want to add a piece I can tell which ones are not paying attention because they have this glassy eyed look while staring at their screens. As a teacher, I’m now competing with the very technology I introduced to peak their interest. Rheingold wrote that while we are obsessed with technology we can still train our attention and teach our students how to train their attention.

In order to be able to teach my students how to train their attention, I really need to understand where I focus my attention. Most everything I do is now on the computer or the internet. That’s how I pay bills, create lessons, watch tv and communicate with my family. I am constantly connected and rarely find myself not. I have noticed that I can’t even sit still long enough to watch a movie or show without pulling my phone out. Usually, it’s to look something up about what I am watching but still my attention is never fully focused on one thing anymore.  I have a friend who is a nurse for an ophthalmologist, she told me that most people do not blink when they are scrolling through their phones, which is, in turn, causing eye dryness. How bizarre that our attention is so focused on what we are looking at on our phones we don’t even stop to blink!

While attention really stood out with me I do feel that Rheingold’s other literacies are just as important to creating a population of ‘net smart’ and net savvy users. When we teach and model the five literacies for our students we are creating a new well-rounded technology smart group of students.

Copyright Clarity

My understanding of Copyright law and Fair Use was very limited. I really didn’t think much of it when it came to my resources for my classes. I assumed that because it was for education I was good. While I was reading Renee Hobbs kept saying how some teachers lived in fear of copyright and the whole time I kept thinking, really?! I thought about my colleagues, none of them seemed to be working in fear. I wondered if they even worried about copyright and fair use. After I read Copyright Clarity, I realized that I wasn’t completely covered under this education immunity I had created in my head.

The hardest piece to understand is Fair Use. I really thought that as long as I cited the source and didn’t make money off of it then it was fair use. Now I understand that it’s not that simple. I can use a copyrighted item as long as I transform its intended use. I also need to be able to back up my fair use. When I told my colleagues this they were surprised, many like me, did not have a clue about how copyright worked.

If I didn’t have a clear understanding of copyright law and fair use then I know for sure that my students wouldn’t either.  I was concerned for them not just on school assignments but also on their digital lives. Many of my students create content and put it on the internet. There was a huge possibility that they could be in violation of copyright laws. It’s important for me to not just explain the law to them but to also model it for them. They need to see how copyright and fair use, how transformativeness works for them.