Sunday, March 13, 2011

The Culture of the Photocopy

I didn't know in detail all about copyright conditions when using materials on the web. Now, I know and I will take into consideration what I learned in this unit every time I will use them.
In Venezuela, people don’t care about copyright issues, it is not a problem at all. It is very difficult to change this conception when people are not aware that they are breaking the law. I could enumerate the reasons of this “free use” of any kind of materials without taking into account the implications involve, but there is not an excuse to be exempted from a legal action.
In my school, teachers usually write the name of the source from where they have taken the materials using in class. But students, not only copy and paste every thing they find, they also want to photocopy and print everything they need. This situation turned too strong that now, they can copy or print with the permission of the respective coordinators or teachers. This is an example of what I called “the culture of photocopy”, but I mean photocopy, print, burn, download, etc.
In conclusion, we have another responsibility as teachers: to prepare and train our students to be aware of copyright issues and take care to what we and our students do in the classroom.

1 comment:

  1. I so agree with you. Another task we have is to train our students to respect and aknowledge someone else's work. This will help a lot to prevent plagiarism in homework assignment.

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