Edging Ahead…

Essential Question of the Week: Do we as a global society need to rethink copyright laws? What’s our role as educators in copyright usage in schools?

I’m a strong proponent of modernizing copyright laws to reflect changes in both technology AND in society, As part of this course, I added a Creative Commons Atttibution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License to this blog. I’m on track to become a truly 21st century “cyber-citizen”.

I still worry, however, about simply bowing to the inevitable: the inevitable, in this case, is the perhaps inescapable conclusion that technology is making digital “mashups” of content from a growing number of technically accessible sources the norm in the “cyber” world.

Should we just assign a Creative Commons license to everything out there and be done with it? Encourage our students to troll the web, grab a selection of keyword-linked bits, paste them up in an approximation of original thought (providing  web-link attribution where it’s obviously not our own material) and throw in a few pithy aphorisms to give the piece the illusion of depth? It’s the way of the future, it seems.

But then a piece; a well-researched, documented and carefully crafted written piece, comes across my desk that forces me to re-think my complacency at accepting yet another small chipping away of traditional standards of scholarly research and creative expression. Make no mistake; I believe that the current penchant for posting every whimsy and personal conceit to the cyber-world at large is morphing the global pool of informative thought and creative expression into a quagmire of personal opinion superfluity.

The piece that got me thinking along this line was was an article in the March 20, 2009 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. forwarded to me by Dr. Jeff Harper, a thoughtful and broadly-read HS Counselor at our school, the article reminds me to consider the possible logical conclusions if we continue down the path which has brought us;

The Globalization of Cheating

Image reproduced from “Cheating Goes Global as Essay Mills Multiply” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 20, 2009

Do we, as a global society, need to rethink copyright laws?” Of course. With the exponential growth of data and knowledge, we need to find new ways of exploiting and sharing original thought, recombining disparate ideas, and creating original new theses to explain our world. These kinds of creative endeavors should not be hamstrung by archaic systems of citation or attribution.

What’s our role as educators in copyright usage in schools?

• To move past the “letter of the law” approach focusing on a minimalist “what we can get away with” attitude,  or “the world’s your oyster” approach promoting the tired rehashing of an ever-decreasing pool of original thought.
• To re-introduce a regard for intellectual property that seems to be slipping away, emphasizing, from our efforts at introducing students to scholarly research, the ethical consideration of using other people’s work in the service of our own.
• To consider the “logical conclusion” of promoting uncritical, smorgasbord-based information selection and regurgitation instead of meaningful data harvesting and thoughtful digestion leading to the synthesis of real new ideas.

I don’t believe that it’s possible to overstate the seriousness of this situation. We ignore the “globalization of cheating” at our, and our future decision-makers’, peril; perhaps at the peril of the very societies that have brought about this Information “Garden of Eden”.

How can I make such a broad, sweeping statement? I base this on Jared Diamond’s fifth core reason for societal collapse, which is “the political cultural, and social factors in a society which make it more or less likely that a society will succeed…”

I believe that our inability to retain certain core societal values truly does threaten our very future. Who will generate new Eureka experiences if we teach the next generation to just “borrow” without building on original ideas?  Will the breadth and depth of “scholarly” thought wither from the inevitable decline of original thought when everyone is continually rehashing the thoughts of a few renegade thinkers? Will our society truly Fail, as proposed by Jared Diamond, because, among other things, we do not address root social problems that threaten to destablilize that society – like the “globalization of cheating”.

All of Diamond’s arguments are compelling – and truly frightening for the future. Worth 18 minutes of your time if you haven’t read the book…

TED Talk “Why Societies Collapse”  http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jared_diamond_on_why_societies_collapse.html

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