Copyright, Fair Use and Creative Commons

     Before this class, I really had the bare minimum knowledge of all three of these important topics.  Finding out that each of these was more complicated and interesting than I had thought led me to want to learn more about each and make sure that I try to not violate any of these.  Understanding the complete definition of what Copyright means is going to prevent me and any of my future students from accidentally pirating or using someone else's information.  Knowing that it is having the legal right to a certain piece of information, song, etc. makes it easier for people to avoid using it or asking for permission for it.  Fair Use, is quoting someone else's information and using it in a piece of work that you are creating.  This will be helpful to learn more about this when teaching my students or having them do some sort of research project and need to provide facts that they cannot come up with on their own.  Finally, Creative Commons was an organization that was recently formed that encouraged the sharing of artistic work.  Teaching my future students about all of these different concepts will help them to prevent new laws to be passed such as SOPA and PIPA.  In the future when I am writing my personal statement, doing research on a particular disability or something of that matter I will be sure to use my knowledge of these concepts to assure that I do not violate any laws or not give proper credit for information that I got from the internet or other sources.

Collaborative Learning Response

     In class last week we were provided with a video by Steven Johnson about collaborative learning and its' effects on us as students and future educators.  The ideas that he presented were very interesting and it caused me to think about things in a different way than I had before now.  I liked hearing that if you leave time and space for a good idea to form instead of forcing a mediocre idea you will come up with something that is worth thinking about.  I have not personally experienced a long or drawn out "slow hunch" but for me the shorter and quicker "slow hunches" happen quite often for me.  Leaving room in your ideas for the addition of more information or better ideas from other people will give you more time and opportunity for details to be developed.  What I have learned from this video was to give special time to the ideas I am trying to come up with and leave room for other people's ideas to enhance mine to create something big.
     The writing by Davis was almost as interesting and eye opening as the video.  I learned about things that had never been presented to me before.  I never knew that there were so many options for collaborative learning and it was nice to see the different potential things we could do for a group project.  There were so many different options it was hard to choose a few to base or group project off of for class.  I did learn that smaller groups were more efficient and beneficial for learning and accomplishing tasks.  Rules make a group go 'round.  I will utilize these learned skills for future classroom group projects or classes I'm going to take.