Case+38+-+Ms.+Cochran's+Space+Exploration+Class

Ms. Cochran’s school district is creating a curriculum for a space exploration class. She wants to incorporate a much digital media as possible because the text for the class is outdated and there is always new information coming from NASA. The NASA website has great material with an “Image of the Day” and NASA TV with video on demand, but cannot be the only source of material. So much of the space program was directed by political motivations so it important to analyze the climate and culture of the US and the Soviet Union during the space race. The teacher would also like to incorporate some of the propaganda surrounding the space program at the time of the moon landing and the propaganda even now that claim that the moon landing never occurred. There are quite a variety of videos on sites like youtube that are “homemade” or even taken from news programs. She knows that the videos from news programs should not even been on youtube to begin with but really wants students to see this information. She decides to ask students to find a few videos online at home and paraphrase the information found instead of showing it in class. She then wants students to investigate the ability of special effects by taking a scene from a popular movie that is highly recognizable and changing in a way that is “undetectable” but changes what the scene represents such as adding another character into a scene. She knows that taking the media and altering it for an assignment is covered in fair use, but she is not sure if it will be ok to post the results of the project on the web.

There are a few issues that must be addressed in this scenario starting from using the information on the NASA website, showing videos found on youtube that have been taken from other copyright sources, and then taking a scene from a movie to edit for class and then also post to the web. Each of those issues takes from different aspects of the Fair Use guidelines and some are more clear than others where the line should be drawn. The NASA website is able to be used in class with no problem along with taking clips of the movie for students to use in the project to edit because it is creating new material. Showing the youtube videos in class would be a problem, but suggesting that students get ideas from them, on their own should not be a problem.