Teaching for the Future: TftF 76: Teaching for the Future 1.9

Mp3

News:
São Paulo: The City That Said No To Advertising
from Buisnessweek.com: I has been a year since the No Advertising initiative in São Paulo was signed into law and it seems to be working out well. The lack of ads has allowed residents to really appreciate the city in a way they were never able to do ever before. I wish Boston or New York would try something like this, imagine what we might be missing.

Superintendent’s Speech Stirs Talk of Plagiarism NYTimes.com: The now former Superintendent of Schools in Fort Lee, NJ was caught stealing her speech to the National Honors Society. Not only did she swipe her speech from the web, but she swiped it from About.com. To many of you this may be evidence of how easy it is for students to steal and plagiarize from the web, but all I can think about is how any high school student worth his or her salt would have at least changed some of the speech.

If nothing else I hope the students in the National Honors Society learned the importance of being honest and original in their work.

PFT #92 from Podcast for Teachers: I heard about the above story from the New York Times from the Podcast for Teachers, hosted and produced by Marc Gura and Kathy King. They were both flabbergasted by the fact that someone in the education could make such a mistake. However there was one thing that I found irritating. Dr.King was amazed that not only did the administrator take the content and present it as her own, but she was upset that the administrator ignored About.com's User Agreement. According to Dr.King the user agreement clearly stated that the user needs to ask permission to use content.

The user agreement does in fact state that "You agree not to modify, reproduce, retransmit, distribute, disseminate, sell, publish, broadcast or circulate any such material without the written permission of About.com or the appropriate affiliate."

And that's when my ears really perked up. I can't believe that any website could realistically expect for others to ask permission to quote form their publicly available material. I think it is wrong to reproduce whole articles, but content creators need to be open for other content creators to borrow and share ideas.

I do not plan on writing About.com for permission to quote their user agreement, but I did let Mark Gura and Kathy King know that I was using a clip from their show as a courtesy to them.

Upcoming:
Teaching for the Future 2.0 is on the way. Take a look at the wiki and try to get involved.

If you want to help out or participate with Teaching for the Future you can leave a comment on the homepage or link to us on your blog or podcast. If you want to get in touch, feel free to email at teachingforthefuture@gmail.com.

Tags: Dave LaMorte, teaching for the future, technology, education, podcast, teaching, media literacy, visual literacy, new media literacy