Educational Media Awareness Campaign

Goal

The goal of the Educational Media Awareness Campaign is twofold:

1. To help educators make the best use possible of the internet in terms of finding media to use in their learning resources.
2. To help educators integrate media into their learning resources both correctly and legally, paying attention to re-usability for others and permissions issues.

The educational media awareness campaign is targeted primarily at the primary and secondary education sectors, but is also of use for the tertiary, informal and other education sectors.

The background

The greatest problem facing authors of digital educational resources is (il)legal use of images. Publishers, both electronic and paper-based, are constantly bombarded with submissions and uploads which have to be rejected or cleansed for image copyright reasons, and image copyright infringement is rampant in schools. ^[1]

This is an absurd situation. It is absurd because in the last few years, the availability of well-documented, re-usable and redistributable media resources from the internet has mushroomed. Wikimedia Commons offers in excess of 2500000 (two-and-half-million) legally re-usable, subject-related and excellently categorised images. Flickr offers another 60000000 (sixty million) legally re-usable images, albeit less well categorised and not always so obviously subject-related. With resources such as these, nobody needs to be illegally using images.

The Educational Media Awareness Campaign seeks to address this problem. The Campaign will combine the use of galleries of featured re-usable images, case studies on finding suitable media, lists of recommended internet media repositories, and tutorials on image licencing and documentation. In particular, the Campaign will usually seek to introduce educators to the educational use of Wikimedia Commons.

A multi-site effort

The Educational Media Awareness Campaign is a Wikiversity Outreach subproject which seeks to involve and coordinate with other educational and media sites.

The galleries and pictures of the day

The campaign's galleries currently include 100 selected and featured images, spread across 12 subjects of the typical school curriculum. The 100 images are carefully captioned and linked to sources of 1000's of related images, so that they can serve as entry points for educators. The 100 images are also divided into a number of dynamic pages so that they can feature on wikis as "pictures of the day", with a fresh picture each day. These rotating or dynamic page sections are available both for the whole collection and for each of the 12 constituent subjects.

References

1. ↑ BBC News (March 2008): "Schools using photo images downloaded from the internet on their websites are being warned they could face huge bills in unpaid copyright fees...."