Plagiarism V.S. Copyright violation

It is obvious that taking someone else’s work and saying that it is yours is not correct. Plagiarism and copyright violation both deal with this issue. Although some of us might think that these two offences are the same, in fact they are not. However, since most of the people think that these two offences are both on the same wavelength, some might still fall for the threat of plagiarism.

Therefore, one has to keep in mind that plagiarism takes place when a person uses someone else’s ideas, or words without referencing or giving any credit to that person. This also takes place if the work used is paraphrased or summarized without any acknowledgement.

On the other hand, copyright violation refers to more than just referencing someone else’s work. In fact it is about using someone else’s original work, being it of any type of material, without any consent or reimbursement.

In fact, copyright violation is a more serious offense as it is also put into effect by the courts, while plagiarism is more insisted on by schools and universities. Apart from that, even if the user acknowledges the original creator of a particular piece of work, it is still illegal to take large parts of it. Alternatively, copying small parts of someone’s original work does not mean violating copyright laws as long as you acknowledge the author or creator.

Therefore, one has to pay attention when using these two terms in order not to use them interchangeably. Also it is better to keep in mind that when using information for assignments, dissertations or even for e-learning material, instead of paraphrasing one would better use quotes, footnotes, references as well as keeping quotations short enough in order not to violate copyright.

References:

1:Plagiarism and Copyright violation: http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/policy/academichonesty/p04.htm

2: Copyright and Plagiarism: http://www.pddoc.com/copyright/plagiarism.htm

3: Plagiarism and Copyright Infringement: Is Copying Illegal?: http://www.plagiarismchecker.com/plagiarism-vs-copyright.php

Sharing of resources among teachers

Sharing of resources is in my opinion one of the main aspect in e-learning. Sarah in her blog “E-learning vs. Copyright and IPR” commented about the issue of teachers sharing their resources and whether teachers will be willing to share resources. In a particular website by Greg Webb (http://ps.pageseeder.com/ps/jg/papers/teachers/teachers.pshtml) elicited some points on why teachers are unwilling to share their resources in which I wish to elaborate in this post.

Among the points that he mentioned I agreed perfectly with the point where he said “fear of being judged by peers”. I think that this is crucial because teachers are not used to be assessed especially seniors one. Thus when they are asked to share their resources they tend to be afraid that they are not of a high quality and thus the other teachers will gossip about their resources. Also they might be afraid that there will be some information which is not updated and thus this will show that they are not doing their work good enough. I heard a situation where teachers were not willing to allow students’ teachers observing them in classes because they were afraid that they will tell something to the assistant head or the head.

On the other hand those teachers who work really hard to produce new resources may also not be willing to share them because of loss of intellectual property. Abuses happens all the time and some teachers may take the resources of other teachers, remove their names and add their names. Also the issue of power where sharing of resources as Webb describes 'empowers' non-experts.

I think that in order to move to e-learning and sharing of resources, one has to encourage team work between teachers and even start doing this from university where we will be brought up with the mentality of contributing and sharing our resources and not constantly competition with each other.

There also should be a system which will be monitored and where teachers can use other teachers’ resources depending on how much (and also the quality) they contributed on sharing their resources. In this way the problem of abusing from this sharing will be minimised.

Webb., G (2000). Why Teachers Don't Share Resources, And What We Can Do About It retrieved from http://ps.pageseeder.com/ps/jg/papers/teachers/teachers.pshtml on 8th January, 2011

E-learning vs. Copyright and IPR

From my own experience, during my secondary years at school, importance to copyright was never given. In the sense that we have never been told to credit people’s work: if used in our projects, homework and other work. This led me to finding it difficult to credit others’ work later in my life especially when I started this course at the University. Only our Sociology teacher (at Junior college) gave importance to this copyright issue.

This made me aware how important it is for students to know and appreciate others work. In fact, during my teaching practice, whenever I asked the students to find some information, I made it clear that they should reference the book/ site used. I must say that not all of did this since they are not used in doing so (it is like a ripple effect. The problem still lies in the educators).

Students just copy and paste the information they think is right. Sometimes they do not even read the text they choose. I think, the first thing we should do is teach the students how and most of all why is this important. A real example can be shown by using the students’ own work and introduce the importance of copyright from there.

If an e-Learning system was to be introduced in today’s schools, I think that a lot of problems would arise in respect to this issue. First of all, students will view this as an open source sharing information without understanding the idea behind it. Moreover, what will be available depends on what the teachers are willing to share, what can be digitized and also what can be shared without the violation of copyright (however, let’s take into consideration the cc)

I found the following quote which I think it describes today’s situations about e-learning:

‘Almost 99.99% of the courses have only course outlines and syllabus. It is like browsing through a CD category, knowing what songs are available yet unable to hear them.’

This can be a result due to teachers not willing to share their content with other teachers. For example during the SDP meeting held at the school I was at (in my teaching practice), the principal commented on the idea of sharing. He also wanted the teachers to visit other schools (of the same college) and mingle with other teachers by sharing ideas.

The following objective policies were found from The University of the Arts London Intellectual Property Rights (IPR): Policy and Guidelines. The objectives of these guidelines state the following:
• A culture of students and teachers working together is supported.
• New skills and knowledge would be shared.

I think that rather than guidelines (although they should be taken into consideration), first, it is more important for educators to become aware of the benefits of when information is shared and then abide by the guidelines and policies .

References:
1. Google book: Globalized E-Learning Cultural Challenges. (2007). By Andrea Edmundson
2. http://intranet.arts.ac.uk/intellectual-property/

Simplifiying Semantic Web

As Tim Berner-Lee’s concept of the web was:

“My dream for the Web has two parts. In the first, I see the Web becoming a much more powerful means for collaboration among people. In the second, collaborations extend to computers. Machines become capable of analysing all the data on the Web – the contents, links and transactions between people and computers”

The Semantic Web accomplishes this concept.

The Semantic Webs’ job is to make computer understand, find and integrate web pages that are understandable for human beings. This is possible because metadata is added to web pages which recognize and exploit relationships between items. These metadata are shared to various applications. Metadata is one of the pillars of semantic web. The other is Ontologies. Ontologies create similarities between items from different gatherings described with different vocabularies.

There are various semantic web projects that are working out well such as commerce and medicine. The Semantic Web is more effective in specific subject because there are more metadata that match to each other and the specific area users are more willing to improve to the metadata and develop ontologies.

The Semantic Web is not an application provider but it provides applications, it provides standards which are used to add applications through intelligent linking. The next step is to use Semantic Web for library web services.

Burke, M. (2009, March 6). The Semantic Web and the digital library. Aslib Proceedings New Information Perspective, pp. 316-322A.

Evaluating Online Learning Resources

It is important that teachers or evaluators that are in the process of creating learning resources for online learning must consider the learning resources in areas such as the content/format, instructional design, evaluation/assessment and social considerations.

Content/Format

The material is significant to the aims and objectives of the curriculum. It should be accurate, completed and up-dated. They should be easy to use and durable so that they are suitable for the classroom.

Instructional Design

The content should be in the form of activities not lecture-based. It should be prepared in a way that students should work both in groups and individually. The Material should promote the idea to students to ask questions, think, react and decide. Choice and flexibility are to be given to meet the students’ requirements for different abilities, learning styles and interests. The content should be in guided form. Support from teacher should be also available.

Evaluation/Assessment

The learning resources should be supportive for the individual to continue the learning. It should provide both formative and summative evaluation. The assessment should be given both after each module of the course and at the end of the whole course. The assessment is to provide information that the students can relate to.

Social Consideration

The content should be sensitive to any gender, sexual orientation, culture and heritage. It is important to promote equality and support students’ self-esteem. Students with special needs should be able to integrate themselves with the material as being part of the class. Good role models should be used when they are included in the learning material.

Apart from these, the learning material could take into consideration the audience that it is going to target. Meaning that, the resources used are to be adequate for the classroom situation. Also, the age and the native language should be included in the list of things that are needed to be evaluated before producing the learning resources.

Audience Considerations

To help students, the text organization should be aided with tables of contents, glossaries, chapter titles, identify sub-topics and summaries. As the learning material can be accessed by students from different countries the resource language should have a vocabulary that can be understood by many if not all, clear sentence structure and development that clearly identify the main idea. Using useful graphics to enhance the main ideas are important and they should be placed near the text that it corresponds to.

Media Considerations

Any videos used should engage the students’ attention. There must be a balance between education and entertainment. The length of presentation should not be too long as it will lose the students’ interest. The resource should give the opportunity to think about it. Also, the resource should be about a significant situation. A digital resources provide the students with interactivity while they are learning and also give feedback. It should be customizable to the needs of the students. This type of resources must be accessible by the majority of the target students.

Various. (Revised 2002). General Learning Resources Consideration. In Evaluating, Selecting and Managing Learning Resources: A Guide (pp. 13-24). British Columbia - Ministry of Education.

Semantic Web

The word semantic is defined as “meaning” and thus semantic web means web with a meaning. In more detail one can say that it is a web which is able to set up statements which are understood by both humans and computers. These statements are built through a number of syntax rules which make all statements able to be understood by some, if not all, computer applications. Following this, it becomes evident that semantic web is not, as what a large number of people believe, a number of web pages linked to each other. On the contrary it is the description of the relationship and properties between items mentioned on the web pages.

However, when mentioning semantic web, one cannot just look at the definition of semantic web and stop there, as there are much more details at which one have to take a look. The following are some of the issues that one has to think about:

(1) Language.

When using semantic web, even the language changes. In fact, Resource Description Framework (RDF) is used. This language is used for describing the information and assets on the web. These are basically files which are to be filled with information to make it possible for computer programs to be able to search, collect, analyze and process information. Indeed since information about particular topics is saved in RDF files, web applications can collect information from different sources and present it in a more significant manner. One example of RDF which is used to build semantic web applications is RSS.

(2) Web Agents.

Differing from normal searches for information on the web, semantic web cannot be searched for using the normal searches. In fact, to access semantic web one needs to have a special software, called semantic web agents or semantic web services which are used to help the user find what information is looking for on semantic web.

(3) Security

How can a person using semantic web be sure if other sellers and buyers are to be trusted? To do this a person using semantic web must hold a copy of the credit cards information, bank information, semantic records and also social security information of that particular person. This information can then be places in an RDF through which the semantic web agent can determine if a particular buyer or seller is trustful or not.

(4) Payment

The best payment method to be developed and used when it comes to semantic web, is a deposit account which can be accessed through the internet. This account has to be specifically for deposits only so that anyone can deposit in it by just knowing your ID (similar to using PayPal)

If you think about anymore issues that one need to think about and discuss, please do mention them.

Demystifying E-learning Standards

What are e-learning standards? What do people who implement and design e-learning understand by these standards?

E-learning standards where developed to make content created flexible enough to be used in different contexts. Learning content and resources can be more sensible and articulated for students and developers. E-learning standards are agreements that the people using e-learning can agree upon. E.g. How e-learning content should be tagged. These will be proposed by specification group which then present it to an official board for standardization.

Standards can be de facto which means that they are being followed by the whole or most of the e-learning community before they are actually standardized. For example, XML is a de facto standard as it was adapted by most of the Web developers. Standards should be able to be updated and accept new concepts. Hence, learning content can be integrated but also content from other sources. Another type of standards is de jure which means that they are specified by the Law and are certified by an official body.

Standards to e-learner designers and implementers mean that they have unambiguous and major capabilities:

• Content portability – content can be removed from the original context and used in another context.
• Granularity – smaller units of information give raise to learning at the needed moment
• Interoperability – e-learning applications can share raw data and content but also different applications can access and interchange content.

Standards are important because they have been adopted by the e-learning community and hey can protect the investment done in an e-learning system.

Ref:

Singh H, Reed, C. (2002). Demystifiying E-learning Standards. Industrial and Commercial Training, 65-68.