The SurRural Librarian

Listening to many fellow librarians lately, I’ve been left wondering how and when we agreed to being shills for the movie & music industries.

I believe it’s my job to educate my students on fair use, plagiarism, copyright and the like. I do not believe it’s my job to ensure that the labels and studios are able to squeeze any possible penny out of any school or student that they can, or help them locate and prosecute young downloaders.

I must have been out of the room when they slipped that into my job description.

However, I do take this topic seriously and spend a good deal of time on it with my students. They learn the law and we have fruitful and provocative discussions concerning abuse of power, greed and the sometimes downright silliness that current copyright law encourages.

Here are two great new resources that cropped up this week on Boing Boing.

A site & curriculum:

Teaching copyright: Richard Esguerra registered the domain TeachingCopyright.org as a site for collecting curriculum materials for K-12 teachers who are being asked to explain copyright to their kids. Today, teachers are overwhelmed by slick, self-interested “curriculum” generated by the MPAA and their ilk, which presents a one-sided, inaccurate view of copyright. Richard produced some curriculum himself, and another student, Julianne Gale, supplemented his work with a brilliant lesson plan (pdf) for kids in grades 6-8.

And an out of this world video on Fair Use (yours to download. get it now, before Disney forces them to take it down.) Fair(y) Use Tale, using tiny cuts from many different Disney films mashed together to explain fair use.

Coral Cache link to MP4 download

Link to Stanford page for the film

Educators are constantly penalized and frustrated by restrictive copyright. Isn’t it our duty to protect Fair Use and encourage legislation that expands it? Why are we spending so much effort complaining about teachers who show films in class? Why don’t we focus more on how we can protect the rights of our teachers and students, rather than those of the corporations?

Yesterday in the library my 5th & 6th graders made a model of the internet using cardboard boxes and yarn. Each one had to pick a role out of a hat - some kids were LANS, others ISPs, Search Engines
Commercial Websites, etc. They each had a list of computers they had to create, and they were challenged with getting them all “wired” (yarned) up properly.

They made routers, switches, firewalls, DNS & DHCP machines, printers, airports and desktops & laptops. The kids who made websites made servers with data transactions databases (complete with little paper credit cards inside, their very cute idea). We took about two sessions making the computers and one stringing them together.

I can safely say that they really grasped the whole shebang. All year we’ve been working on troubleshooting computers. (I have the rules I try to enforce that they have to check all wires and reboot at least once before they come and ask me anything, we’re working on it). And we’re always talking about and using the internet. I figured this kind of exercise might help make more concrete some of the abstract topics we’ve discussed. Seems to have worked, I’ll have a recap before school gets out to see how much they’ve retained.

This might not seem like a library lesson. But look at it this way. Many librarians teach their kids how books are made. So why not the internet? I’m hoping that understanding the inner workings of networks will impact their understanding of how everything fits together in their wired world.

And, we had fun. (Look at those IP addresses, aren’t these kids cute?.)

Here’s a tool that will certainly come in handy at school. Brings back memories of sitting on the floor with large strips of construction paper scotch-taped together, World Book encyclopedias scattered around.

Still in the Google Labs,  the Timeline Search:

With the timeline and map views, Google’s technology extracts key dates and locations from select search results so you can view the information in a different dimension.

Keep the kids on their toes, though, otherwise they just might think Theo Epstein worked for the Sox in 1918.

Up until now we’ve been using a drawing program (KP) that’s been pretty buggy and has incredibly obnoxious sound effects, not to mention a heinously annoying little intro song. (otherwise, I like it. no, really.)

Tux Paint is free, simple and incredibly fun. I love the interface, the Lynux penguin and the funny sound effects. It’s got the same types of bells and whistles, just more subdued and tasteful.

There are Windows, Mac and Lynux versions. Being open source, there’s great flexibility to tailor the program as much as you want, and the documentation is in plain English. But the basic install is excellent, so you can also just install and go without any changes.

It passed the 5 year old test
and will soon be running on all my school machines.

I’m at the VITA-Learn Dynamic Landscapes conference and having a ball.

I told the people at my presentation that they should stop by my blog in order to get a free upgrade to their PBWikis. So - tech people - thanks for stopping by, and thanks for coming this morning!

All you need to do is create an account with PBWiki and let me know the url. Also let me know what your ideas are for using a wiki in your classroom. You can either respond to this post, or email me privately pam (at) marlboroschool (dot) net. I choose a couple lucky winners by the end of June.

I can’t wait to hear about your ideas. You guys were a great audience, thanks.

The Reactable is an amazing new instrument developed in Spain. It’s got a tangible interface, meaning you move the icons around - rather than point and click.

I’ve been slightly obsessed with these videos (1, 2, 3). I’m not sure if it’s the retro prague rock sound or the completely cool little blocks that thrill me the most.

Searching for a reason to show the videos in class, I realized it would be a great way to talk about the difference between command line and GUIs, and what a huge difference that’s made, making computers accessible to non-computer scientists.

The kids were agog (admittedly, it was first thing in the AM). There’s something so compelling about being able to touch what you normally click. We had a good discussion about what it would be like to be able to move your iTunes or Word around like that. They made some pretty creative comments.

Now I need to think of a way to work the Puppy Monorail into class.

both via Boing Boing