Blog Journal 2 - Word, Fair Use, and Tech Implementation Issues

Welcome back to my blog! In this edition we take a look at Microsoft Word, copyright in education, and issues brought about by technology.

Microsoft Word has been a really important program in my educational career, for as long as I can remember really. I think I was doing assignments in Word as far back as 5th grade, so the program is definitely nothing new. However, it seems like every class I take that involves Word teaches me something new about it- either that or I have a really bad tendency to forget stuff about it. Either way, Word has all sorts of very useful features to help a student compose essays and to help teachers make assignments, newsletters, and stuff. As a student, there's no way I would do well on any essay if I didn't have Word to properly format it for me. As a teacher, there's no way I'd be able to hold a student or parent's attention on a newsletter if I didn't have Word to spruce it up and make it look nice. The program is just so useful in education.

With the use of programs like Word, though, and the availability of information and resources it provides, that of course raises the question of how copyright and fair use should be addressed. Given that what you put in a Word document to use in class could very well be copyrighted, some steps need to be taken to make sure that the usage is legal. The material you put in, say, a newsletter should not be entirely copied material- what you put in should outweigh what is taken from other sources, and what you take from other sources should be credited to them. Students should also be made aware of copyright, and as a teacher it is important to make sure students understand how to properly use copyrighted material. Students should understand that they can't just copy the whole thing and claim it as their own, and other general rules like that.

Speaking of copying, it is an unfortunate reality of technology that all sorts of shortcuts to complete assignments are at our fingertips. Students have free access to all sorts of online resources that make plagiarism so much easier. Academic dishonesty is a serious issue that needs to be tackled in the classroom. However, it seems like properly cracking down on plagiarism is rather difficult- people will always take shortcuts if they feel the need. As such, I feel that the best I could do to counter plagiarism is to make it very clear that any sort of academic dishonesty is an automatic failure on the assignment. Coupled with this, though, would be a bit of a lenient attitude toward late work- the assignment loses around 5% off its grade for every day that it's late, up to 2 weeks, at which point the assignment just goes in as a 0.

An issue that sort of goes hand-in-hand with academic dishonesty is a reduction in productivity as a result of technology. In my own high school days, my friends and I spent way too much time doing basically anything but assignments if we had access to computers. A few of us spent the better part of two weeks just trying to get around the system's blocks and restrictions to port our own games onto the school computers. Luckily for our grades and disciplinary records, we were never successful. Now, during this time, however, something bizarre happened- we got our work done at an accelerated rate. We were so stoked to get back to our amateur hacking attempts that we cranked out essays, worksheets, any assignment you can think of, at incredible speeds- and we did good work on these, too. I wrote what must have been about a two thousand word essay over the course of two class periods so I'd have as much time as possible to aimlessly toy with the computers- and I made a good grade on that essay, too! Point being, productivity reduction mainly seems to be an issue if students have no way to channel their productivity toward a goal. I think a good way to avoid this would be to give students the opportunity to use their time in class to do whatever they want on the computers (within reason, of course, I'm no madman), so long as they complete their work beforehand. I feel that the freedom this offers would give students something to work toward and provide extra motivation to complete assignments.

Anyway, this ended up being pretty long, so I apologize for my rambling, and thanks for coming to my TED Talk!