Learning about Copyright laws

    

by Justin

This past week, our class had the opportunity to teach each other about our assigned projects. These projects enabled each of us to not only learn about our copyright topic, but also teach others about it. I personally think that this was a brilliant idea, because this allows us students to study and research about our topic, rather than just the teachers standing up and giving a lecture while the students sleep. I think this was a very beneficial way to study and learn about copyright rules and citing various sources.

For example, my partner and I had the opportunity to research about the topic Open Source. After we took about two days to research and study about the topic, we started creating a presentation on powerpoint to present and teach to our classmates. When many people hear about copyright and citing sources, they think that they already know everything concerning the important topic. But no, many people don't about it , and also don't know the importance behind it. I myself thought that it was very boring, but I knew that these topics were very important. Open source is that topic I researched over, and I learned that open source is any program that can be modified by anyone. Anyone can modify and change it to make it for their personal use. That was only one of the topics that I explained to my classmates. Each of us shared our topic and taught it to each other. These are all important topics for everyone to know and learn. The topics were current copyright law, fair use guidelines, creative commons, and open source. Everyone one of these are important. The current copyright law allows us to know what they are and the standards of giving credit for who wrote it. Fair use guidelines, provides some limits on the author’s work and how its used. All the other ones are just as important as the ones mentioned, but the main thing that I learned in this unit is that you can't take someone's work without giving them the credit.

Overall so far this class has been very interesting and exciting, And this could not have been made possible without our awesome teacher Mrs. Bartis. She comes up with things to learn while still making it fun and interesting. Yesterday we did a synectics activity where we compared our topics to things in our world. I really enjoyed this class so far, and I  am very eager to continue moving forward in this class, while learning things that we need to learn.