Legal and Ethical Issues

In any technology project you need to consider legal and ethical issues.
Legal issues are to do with the law.
Ethical issues are to do with right and wrong.
Ethical issues are things that people argue passionately about.
Actions can be legal but not ethical.
Actions can also be - defended as - ethical but not legal.
Sometimes what is legal is also open to argument.
An interesting recent example from the media is the case of the Waihopai Spy Base trial, where the peace protestors claimed that what they did was to prevent suffering and was therefore not illegal.

You MUST include legal and ethical issues somewhere in your project - either your key factors or your codes of practice would be sensible. And you will need to talk about these issue again in yuor evaluation.

School Policy Documents

The school's policy documents for websites are now available in iNet -> DigiTech -> Ms Fahy -> DTM201.

Codes of Practice

Some points to consider here:

• Check last year's post explaining what a code of practice is.
• Remember that you need to provide evidence of how you have "followed the rules" in your code(s) of practice.

Areas that seem important to me are

• Privacy
• Copyright
• Appropriate language and use
• Teacher professional standards.

Sources of information include:

• Teacher Union guidelines for Web 2 safety for teachers
• Netsafe considerations for blogging and Web 2 in schools
• The use policy of whichever Web 2 tool you decide to use (Blogger, Facebook, Bebo...)
• School ploicy on our web presence - am trying to track this down and will let you know when I have found it.
  

Copyright

When you are making something for a real customer and a real reason, you need to be "squeaky clean" about copyright. This means that EVERYTHING you use MUST be either copyright free or your own personal work. If you wish to use something that is copyrighted, you must ask for and get permission, and keep the evidence.
Just so there is no excuse for misunderstanding, EVERYTHING includes

• Video
• Still images
• Music
• And anything else!

And MUST means MUST!

Finding copyright-free material can be a challenge. When looking for still images, use Google Advanced Images Search and under Usage Rights select "labeled for reuse". At home, you could try Flickr - amateur photographers are often keen to share their work.

You may not use mp3 files, even if you own the CD. If you want to read more about the laws around this, try these sites:

• NZ Law Society 2009
• Creative Freedom NZ
• Consumer (this is from 2008, so slightly out of date, but explains things simply and clearly)

YouTube

YouTube is great for sharing videos, but of course you can't access it at school. I went looking at its policies and found a page of terms and conditions that you are agreeing to by "using andor visiting" the website. When I copied and pasted the text into Word, it came to 11 pages and 3914 words! I intended to summarise the main points for you but it was just too hard! You can look at the page yourself at home!

Instead, I found YouTube's Community Guidelines and saved them in iNet > ICT > Year 11-12 >CCC Problem. This webpage goes onto two Word pages and is only 745 words long. And it gives us eight guidelines that are easy to summarise and understand. I suggest using these as the YouTube Community Code of Practice. These guidelines are a good place to start when thinking about the standards that the Christchurch City Council is likely to set.

Happy Birthday to the Library!

Christchurch's Public Library is turning 150 this year!
There is a website especially for this event.
As part of the celebrations they are running a competition, asking people to make a 1-3 minute video about the library and upload it to YouTube. The information on the competition page gives some guidelines which are also relevant to our Rugby World Cup video project and may be useful for developing codes of practice.

Example Code of Practice: Website Design

Rules of making a good website include:

1. Homepage called index.htm
2. Images in a folder called images
3. Consistent use of colour schemes and fonts
4. Each page laid out the same way with navigation in the same place
5. Text organised with headings, subheadings and lists
6. Images all copyright free, or used with permission and acknowledged.

This list of rules came from my head, but I also looked at these websites to help me:

• http://www.articlealley.com/article_82455_4.html
• http://www.corriswebsitedesign.com/website-design-rules.html
• http://www.powerhomebiz.com/vol23/rules.htm
• http://www.grantasticdesigns.com/5rules.html
• http://www.sharpened.com/web/about/rules.html

Relevance to my project

In my project I am making a website for my client XXXX. Because they are going to use this website to get people to join their organisation, it is important that it is a high quality website and I want to follow these rules which are important to me.

Screen shot of work

A screen shot of the file structure would provide evidence of rules 1 and 2.

A photo of your sketched page layout would provide evidence of rule 4 and possibly rules 3 and 5.

Evidence for rule 6 could be a screen shot of copyright policy from an image site, or permission to use from the owner of an image.

Evaluation (written after the project is finished)

I followed these rules carefully. It was hard finding copyright-free images of the ****. Breaking the content of each page up into small chunks was good because I had to make sure that I understood it all. I am pleased with my finished website, and the client says "I am thrilled with what you have done for me. It looks really professional. And I love the colour scheme!"

Codes of Practice

Remember we talked about the Road Code, and how it is the rules of how to drive well?
A lot of the things we do in the world have rules about how to do them well. These sets of rules can be called Codes of Practice.
While you are working on your project, you need to collect evidence of the Codes of Practice that you have investigated and used. You will collect evidence from two places

1. Research on what the rules are - from the Internet, a text book, interviewing an expert...
2. In your own project, you should show how you followed the rules.

There is a file in iNet that you can use to do this with, called - wait for it! - Code of Practice.
In the top left box, you put the rules in yoru own words, and where you found them.
In the bottom left box, you explain how you have used these rules in your project.
In the top right box you can put a screen shot or other picture of your work.
In the bottom right box, you write about how well you have done this part of your project.

You will need to work on Codes of Practice several times during your project. The one we started tow ork on in class was about writing a survey to collect information. Other possible topics to do Codes of Practice for are

• storyboarding
• copyright
• video editing
• credits
• file management

I suggest that you do at least three relevant Codes of Practice, and show this in your (revised) Gantt chart as happening throughout your project.