One that is still important, despite not being updated since 1995, is RFC 1855. This is one with a whole lot of guidelines about electronic communications. It’s a sort of Miss Manners guide to (n)ettiquette.

From the section on email,

• Unless you have your own Internet access through an Internet provider, be sure to check with your employer about ownership of electronic mail. Laws about the ownership of electronic mail vary from place to place.
• Unless you are using an encryption device (hardware or software), you should assume that mail on the Internet is not secure. Never put in a mail message anything you would not put on a postcard.
• Respect the copyright on material that you reproduce. Almost every country has copyright laws.
• If you are forwarding or re-posting a message you’ve received, do not change the wording. If the message was a personal message to you and you are re-posting to a group, you should ask permission first. You may shorten the message and quote only relevant parts, but be sure you give proper attribution.
• Never send chain letters via electronic mail. Chain letters are forbidden on the Internet. Your network privileges will be revoked. Notify your local system administrator if your ever receive one.
• A good rule of thumb: Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you receive. You should not send heated messages (we call these “flames”) even if you are provoked. On the other hand, you shouldn’t be surprised if you get flamed and it’s prudent not to respond to flames.

Are these guidelines of any use? I think that they are and I think we can adopt them into our blogging philosophies as well. The interweb is not a free for all for educators.

No related posts.

In A closed mind about an open world James Boyle looks at our response to knowledge networks.

It is not that openness is always right. Rather, it is that we need a balance between open and closed, owned and free, and we are systematically likely to get the balance wrong. Partly this is because we still do not understand the kind of property that exists on networks. Most of our experience is with tangible property; fields that can be overgrazed if outsiders cannot be excluded. For that kind of property, control makes more sense. We still do not intuitively grasp the kind of property that cannot be exhausted by overuse (think of a piece of software) and that can become more valuable to us the more it is used by others (think of a communications standard). There the threats are different, but so are the opportunities for productive sharing. Our intuitions, policies and business models misidentify both. Like astronauts brought up in gravity, our reflexes are poorly suited for free fall.

And on a similar subject (well sort of):

The Digital Learning Challenge: Obstacles to Educational Uses of Copyrighted Material in the Digital Age

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has released a CC licensed white paper about the copyright difficulties faced by educators.

While the primary task of the foundational white paper was to identify these obstacles, the paper concludes with some discussion of paths toward reform that might improve the situation. It suggests that certain types of legal reform, technological improvements in the rights clearance process, educator agreement on best practices, and increased use of open access distribution would help overcome the obstacles we identified.

via Will Richardson
Be aware, of course that New Zealand does not (yet?) enjoy the same fair use provisions as other countries.

The Copyright Act, 1994.
A Readers Digest type summary of NZ Copyright Law from Consumer
A review of teacher’s copyrights from Mark Treadwell

Related posts:

1. Linkeracy – 16th August 2006
2. Linkeracy – 19th August 2006
3. Linkeracy – 26th August 2006