The main way that I would have changed the class in order to make it better would have been to show more videos about copyright infringement. We talked about how the rap 2 Live Crew helped to set the bar for copyright laws. I would imagine that there would be numerous videos that showed this group fighting for their rights. I believe that showing these videos would have been beneficial to the lecture.

The instructors main purpose was of course to teach us about the ins and outs of copyright laws and to try and learn about them. I also believe that her main intention was to make sure to instill in us that anytime we are involved in making a creative piece that we be careful and pay attention to the copyright laws. The idea of being more careful is what I was able to take away from this class.

NCAC.org: The National Coalition Against Censorship. 25 November 2008. <http://www.ncac.org/about/about.cfm>

Author: The National Coalition Against Censorship is a group comprised of 50 nonprofit organizations whose sole purpose is to oppose the idea of censorship. The nonprofit organizations consist of civil rights groups, educators, as well as literary, artistic, and religious groups. They were founded in 1974 with the intent of defending the First Amendment freedoms of thought, inquiry, and expression.

Audience: The intended audience of this website is for anybody who is against the promotion of censorship. I used it due to its relation to Education, but it is also aimed towards many different areas of censorship. The audience could range from scholarly researchers to people who are curious as to why a book has been banned.

Summary: The basis of this website is strictly to speak out against the unconstitutional use of censorship in all aspects of American life. They cover well over 50 different important issues related to censorship including race, religion, sex, and most importantly, education.

Critical Comment and Relevance: This website can be of extreme use to my mission statement that censorship helps to limit education. The main thing I like about this website is that it not only voices their opinion on the use of censorship, but they also bring forth examples of why it is wrong. The only problem that I find with this website is that it would be hard to use it as a scholarly resource due to its bias nature.

ACLU.org: American Civil Liberties Union. 25 November 2008. http://www.aclu.org/freespeech/censorship/index.html

Author: The American Civil Liberties Union is a well known organization that has been fighting for years to help preserve all of the basic rights that are granted to all American Citizens. It is a nonprofit organization that was founded in 1920. They have been instrumental in helping to work for many different civil rights groups such as gay and lesbian, african american, native american, and people of disabilities.

Audience: The intended audience of this website is also for any person who is interested in all of our civil rights being upheld with a concentration on the idea of censorship. This website touches on many more broad topics than just censorship, but they do a great job of talking about that as well. The audience would be expected to be more scholarly than casual due to the complex nature of the argument.

Summary: As a whole, this website os focused more towards the general wellbeing of our rights rather than just censorship. However, they do focus a tremendous amount of effort and time towards the opposition of censorship, especially when related to the use of it in schools. They have countless amounts of articles from all over the nation that focus on the use of censorship and they help to put their spin as to what the problems with it is.

Critical Comment and Relevance: This article is very useful, but not quite as useful as my other one. The first article that I used was able to focus much more strictly censorship whereas this one takes a much broader approach. The part of the website that does focus on censorship is still very useful however and was able to provide me with a large amount of information.

B. Research Question: How does censorship help to effect the quality of education that students get?

As I went through the entire process of my research question, I did find that it made quite a few transitions along the way. My initial research question was going to focus strictly on the use of censorship in Elementary education and how it effected those students. However, the farther I got along in my process the more I realized that censorship effects students at all different levels of education. Therefore, I decided to focus on the broader concept since I could tell that I would be able to get much more information. Through the different parts of research, I was able to go through that process in order to come up with my final research question.

http://student.uncw.edu/jph6014/bib..html

This reading was a very good reading in that it taught me a lot while being a very short article. I always knew that making films and documentaries involved going through many different hoops, but I had no idea that something so small as a 4.5 second clip could cause such a commotion.

This reading is relevant to a class that involves research due to its focus on the idea of copyrights. If you are involved in anything that involves research, you may find yourself needing to sample a clip from a movie or song. This reading can help to teach us that if you are thinking about using such a clip, then you will need to know all of the copyright laws.

As a student, this doesn’t really impact me personally. However, I could easily see the impact that it could have on anybody involved in the Film Department. These students could often be asked to make short films or to do parodies of other short films. This reading can help to inform them on all the copyright laws that go into that.

Scholarly Articles

Olagunju, Amos O. “Harmonizing the Interests of Free Speech, Obscenity, and Child Pornography on Cyberspace: The New Roles of Parents, Technology and Legislations for Internet Safety.” The Regulation of Cyberspace: Balancing the Interests. March 2008. ERIC. Ebsco. Randall Library, University of North Carolina at Wilmington. 19 Nov. 2008. http://0-web.ebscohost.com.uncclc.coast.uncwil.edu/ehost

Author: Amos Olagunju is a professor at St. Cloud State University. He works in the Department of Statistics and Computer Networking. He has many different scholarly articles all throughout the database dealing with online securities and other topics related.

Audience: This is a scholarly article that is aimed at other people who are interested in the scholarly aspect of online censorship. It is not intended for a fun read, instead aimed towards people who are looking to be educated on the topic.

Summary: This article is aimed strictly at the idea of censorship and regularity of the internet. He contends that parents and legislation should do everything in their power to help regulate what their children are able to access online. He claims that with proper legislation and online security devices, then parents should be able to help limit what there children are able to access.

Critical Comment and Relevance: This article is able to bring about many interesting statistics about the availability of many different items, such as child pornography, to children of all ages. The author is able to assess all the good and bad aspects of technology, and in the long run, says that technology is good so long as it is monitored.

Carr, David and Robert Davis. “The Lure of Evil: Exploring Moral Formation on the Dark Side of Literature and the Arts.” Journal of Philosophy of Education. February 2007: 95-112. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Randall Library, UNCW. 19 November 2008. http://0-web.ebscohost.com.uncclc.coast.uncwil.edu/ehost

Author: David Carr is a professor at the University of Edinburgh. He works in the Moray House School of Education and has over 200 articles attributed to him in the database. Robert Davis is a professor at the University of Glasgow and works in the Faculty of Education. He is not quite as published as David Carr, but the database does still attribute over 50 articles to him.

Audience: The intended audience for this particular article is for anybody involved in the arts and literature of todays education. The authors intend to educate these scholars, as well as to persuade them that arguments for censorship are unsustainable.

Summary: The basis of this article is to persuade scholars from around the education universe that censorship of the arts and literature are unnecessary and detrimental to one’s education. The two authors look at certain books or pieces of art that have been prohibited and they state their arguments as to why these prohibitions are rediculous.

Critical Comment and Relevance: The main thing that I liked about this article was the way in which the authors went through and analyzed certain pieces of art and literature that have been banned. They do a great job explaining their reasoning as to why these banishments are unnecessary.

Popular Articles

G.L. “Do It Yourself Censors Strike.” American Libraries. November 2007. 19 November 2008. http://0-web.ebscohost.com.uncclc.coast.uncwil.edu/ehost

Author: I was unable to ever find out what G.L stands for. However, this name is cited under many different popular articles written for many different journals.

Audience: This is a popular article that is written for anybody that wanted a short and interesting read. There are very few facts and statements that would appeal to a scholarly audience.

Summary: The basis of this article was to just summarize three different instances in which censorship had come up in libraries across the nation. The three instances showed books that patrons found to be to sexual and controversial to be in their libraries. The patrons would then check out the books and refuse to return them.

Critical Comment and Relevance: This article was interesting, yet it did not have a large amount of relevance to my topic. Even though it discussed censorship, it did not go into any sort of detail or express any kind of an opinion. This article was simple a news bulletin.

Panarese, Thomas. “A Lesson in Free Speech.” Education Week. July, 2008. 19 November 2008. www.edweek.org/

Author: Thomas Panarese is an English high school teacher in Virginia. He works with the youth who are subject to this topic, thus making him credible.  

Audience: The intended audience of this popular article would be for anybody remotely interested in the use of censorship involving the education of our youth. This can be a good reading for anybody, whether they are scholars or not.

Summary: This article takes a strong stance against the use of censorship, but more so against the people who are involved in censoring. The article looks at a high school district who apologized for having a lesbian couple in the high school yearbook. The author voices his strong frustration about how the school board supported the argument for censorship as opposed to standing up and supporting their students.

Critical Comment and Relevance: This was my favorite article that I have used as of so far for this topic. The author made it very relevant by arguing for the fact that censorship is detrimental to the youth in our education system. He did a great job of voicing his opinion on the matter.

I enjoyed this class because it was one of the most imformative one so far. During this class, I learned the most about a topic in which I previously had zero knowledge of. I did dislike it a little bit, but that is just becuase webpage creations and things of that nature are not of any interest to me. However, the instructor did a good job of making sure that everyone was understanding what they were doing. She made sure of this by making everybody repeat the process twice to make sure that it was implanted how to do it. I will be able to take away from this class the proper way to create a webpage, and that can help me in many aspects of school from here on out.

I actually did not learn many new things from this article, but that is only because we had already talked extensively about it during class itself. Had it not been for the library class however, I would not have known very much about the material. I had previously not known how to accurately use the boolean operators before, or even what a boolean operator was. Since I have been in Library Class, I have learned all about them and I am very confident in using them.

This article is very relevant to my class as well as to any type of research class. Anytime you do some sort of research, you often need to use databases or catalogs to find the material that you need. This article helps to break down all the many aspects of using these types of search engines. I can apply what I have learned to this class, as well as to any class in which the curriculum requires me to do much research.

Proximity Searching: A form of searching in which the database will find what you looked for any form of that phrase. A good example would be if you looked for red brick house, and the database came back with red house of brick.

Phrase Searching: A full text search that matches only those documents that contain the specified phrase you search for, such as “South Carolina Football: Go gamecocks!”

Stop Words: Words that can be filtered out of the search in order to help maintain the integrity of that search. A good example of these words would be a, the, and, or who.

Open Access: Any form of research material that can be found by anyone at anytime for absolutely no cost to the person doing the search.

Citation Database: A database that holds strictly citations rather than the articles of a database. This helps to see where all the different research came from that helped to put a database together.

Citation and Abstract Database: The database that is once again not full text but houses the citations from a database. This also houses an abstract with it, which helps to summarize the articles and to distinguish the authors as scholarly.

Full Text Database: The most commonly thought of database which contains the entirety of whatever article you are looking for. EBSCOhost is a good version of this.

The use of truncation is also a very good new tool to use whenever doing searches. This is a whole new concept for me that I never knew about until this class. It helps to bring up all different variations of a word, thus preventing you from having to do multiple searches on the same topic.

Lastly, Boolean Operators has been a key concept to learn about as well. In the past, whenever I would see those fields, I would just skip over them because I didn’t think they would help at all. However, now that I have learned about their use and relevance, I realize that they help tremendously in the use of searching.

Both of these articles were a true shock to me. I know about the whole idea of not believing everything you read, but I figured that was more for gossip columns or editorials. I had no idea that articles written on such big issues could be as flawed as they are. It amazes me to see the apparent laziness of these so called professionals.

This reading can relate very well to classes involved in information and research. They help to show that it is extremely important to do proper research and to properly peer review your fellow writers. In any kind of research class, you are typically going to be writing research papers. These articles could help open these students eyes to the fact that laziness is not beneficial to the academic world, thus helping them to write better papers.

As a student I can apply it to myself whenever I am writing any sort of research paper. I will be much more diligent in my research, as well as try to be more helpful to any of my peers whose papers I would be reviewing.