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This week we covered topics such as tagging, crowdsourcing, and intellectual property. All of these things are important to understand as the world becomes more technologically inclined. Of particular interest to me was the topic of intellectual property. As a scholar I have to be aware of the standards for intellectual property, which can be very confusing at times because the standards for things such as article citations change often. Plus a lot of the "shortcut" programs are not always up to date, so you have to know how to physically do them yourself. Intellectual property is important with regard to acknowledging what people have done or said. However, I often question it's impact on student learning. For example, a student may have a lived experience that aligns with some key principles of a theory or concept without ever knowing it. They are then told to write a paper about that experience, yet they do not cite anything to support their perspective because it is exactly that. Without ever knowing that there is a theory or concept that exists to explain their personal experience, how would that student be graded on that assignment? Is it fair to the student? I use that example because I was a collegiate athlete and experienced a lot of different athlete issues that have been written about in various scholarly article, yet I had no clue that people were talking about these things. I thought I was coming up with new ideas, but technically had I not cited different authors, I would have been stealing someones intellectual property. Outside of articles, we also have to consider the use of images and music as well. Depending on your field of study you may use a lot of these different bits of information and not even know you are violating laws. At what point should we start
teaching students about intellectual property?
The link below takes you to a website "LawShelf" and gives some great examples and definition of the various types of intellectual property. The definition also show how broad intellectual property is, which is where some of the confusion and challenges may come into play. Makes you feel like EVERYTHING is someone's intellectual property. Even something as simple as a bean bag chair.
https://lawshelf.com/courseware/entry/what-is-intellectual-property