Week 9: Thing 20 - YouTube and Others

From what I hear from other librarians, I am one of the lucky ones whose schools have not blocked YouTube. And it's a very good thing because our teachers and students use it often every day. Our teachers find videos to reinforce a lesson such as the Tiananmen Square protests or the JFK Nixon Debates. Our students use it to upload their own video projects for classes. Yes, I am often policing students who are looking at videos which are far (sometimes very far) from educational use, but blocking its access is definitely not the answer. The benefits far out-weigh the drawbacks.

I was familiar with most of the videos which were posted on the Library 2.0 site, but the March of the Librarians was new to me. I love it...how clever!

But I do have to make mention of an important issue which CathyLib2 pointed out on her post about Wikis - copyright.
Students are often using copyrighted music to accompany their videos and it certainly is becoming a bigger issue as they are uploading these videos to YouTube for the whole world to view. Web 2.0 is great, but as CathyLib2 says, it makes it way too easy to share things that are not supposed to be shared. We librarians have a big job ahead of us!

That being said, here is a video created by a Bucknell professor about copyright laws. Although it is a bit long (and at times, hard to follow) it's a clever parody and quite effective. This just may become part of my library orientation! It certainly is an important issue which both students and teachers need to be instructed.