Dear VDMIS Members,

I’m sure if you’ve subscribed to this interest section that you’re constantly thinking of ways to engage students with digital media, particularly YouTube. For many students, YouTube has become more popular to watch than TV itself!

Both amateurs and professionals use it as a platform to share educational and entertaining content, and because anyone can post to YouTube, not only do students utilize it to share their own videos, but legal and pirated TV shows and movies also get uploaded. The fact that YouTube creates community participation is wonderful, but it then becomes even more important that we as educators engage students in discussions on the fair use of others’ creations. If plagiarism concerns us enough to devote time to teaching students how to quote, paraphrase, and cite, it should be equally important for us to take time to inform students about fair use. Fair use can include discussions about pirating, illegally downloading movies, using YouTube clips in presentations, adding copyrighted songs and images in student-produced videos, and creating remixes from existing YouTube videos. Let’s add these topics to the discussion of academic honesty, which I believe we all value.

As chair-elect, I look forward to continuing the discussion of how to foster creativity in our students’ video projects, but I also hope to encourage every member of VDMIS to make fair use a part of the curriculum when designing assignments that include other creators’ works.

As we continue to excite students with the incredible possibilities media projects can offer, let’s also make the effort to build a community of responsible digital media users.

Sincerely,

Julie Lopez

Julie Lopez has been an instructor at the University of Delaware English Language Institute (UD ELI) since August 2007 and has led teacher-training workshops on student video projects, created promotional videos, and coordinated a program helping students transition to the university. Her work, which includes sample projects for students, videos for language practice, and program videos, can be viewed on her YouTube channel and the UD ELI YouTube channel.