Hi Jan, Very good question -- both from a legal and educational perspective.
Jan asked: My question, to the WE community, is: Should there be a policy (if there > isn't yet) that people should be of legal age to contribute to WE and thus > be expected to be held responsible for what they write? > I must point out that I'm not a legal professional and legislation may be different in your jurisdictions. Therefore, should you need an informed opinion for the development of local school policies regarding participation in open wikis by children, I would recommend that you get legal advice from a professional. >From an intellectual property perspective, minors can assert copyright over their creative works. Therefore we believe that a minor can elect to use a Creative Commons license for their creative works. A minor would not be able to litigate or conclude contracts relating to their copyrighted work without the assistance of a parent / guardian or court appointed "Litigation guardian". Where things get potentially interesting, relates to potential recourse of a minor may have once they achieve majority in cases of where they can argue that the guardian has not acted in the best interests of the minor. However -- I think this gets a little too complicated for the purposes of this thread ;-). The difficulty with minors participating in collaborative websites relates to national privacy protection legislation. For example in the US, children under 13 can legally give personal information with parental consent. Speaking practically -- its not easy to validate or verify whether parental consent of a minor has been obtained and WE have not reasonable means to determine the age of members who create accounts on WikiEducator. Peter Rawsthorne has developed a Privacy Policy for WikiEducator ( http://wikieducator.org/WikiEducator:Privacy_policy ) which requires accounts of contributors under the age of 13 to be created by the parent or guardian. This can easily be done by the teacher who can assign user names offline and create the accounts on behalf of the minors. This is also a good way for a teacher to provide appropriate support for learners in the wiki. >From an educational perspective -- a wiki is an amazing technology to support real learning and collaboration. I think Nellie's work is an inspirational example. These high school learners have succeeded in having their work published in the real world -- that's an authentic learning experience and I congratulate the students and teacher on this achievement. I would really like to see WikiEducator and the OER Foundation work towards the establishment of a wiki for kids -- a space where we can help learners discover the world in which they live, learn about the skills of collaboration and group work, develop the skills of discernment regarding "authenticity" and quality of knowledge, learning about the free culture etc. etc. I would argue that learning to use social software is a contemporary life skill -- not that our kids need much support in using these technologies :-). Take a look at Wikikids (see: http://wikikids.wiki.kennisnet.nl/Hoofdpagina). An inspirational project -- this is a kids wiki project for kids. It is administered by Kennisnet the non-profit agency responsible for promoting and ICTs in Education in the Netherlands and also resposible for representing the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) of the Netherlands internationally. Thanks to dedicated WikiEducators like Nellie, Peter and others I'm sure we are going to take learning to new levels the open way. Cheers Wayne > > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] > On Behalf Of nelliemuller > Sent: Tuesday, March 16, 2010 11:10 AM > To: WikiEducator > Subject: [WikiEducator] WikiEducator quoted in Salem News > > Hello Fellow WikiEducators, > > I thought you may find this article on two of my students who were > quoted as reporters for Salem News: > http://salem-news.com/articles/march102010/israel-survivors.php > > Can WikiEducator be used as a source of news information after a whole > year? Well, it was until I intervened and look where it got me. > > Warm wishes, > Nellie > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "WikiEducator" group. > To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org > To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator > To post to this group, send email to [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected] > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "WikiEducator" group. > To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org > To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator > To post to this group, send email to [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected] > -- Wayne Mackintosh, Ph.D. Director, International Centre for Open Education, Otago Polytechnic, New Zealand. Board of Directors, OER Foundation. Founder and Community Council Member, Wikieducator, www.wikieducator.org Mobile +64 21 2436 380 User Page: http://wikieducator.org/User:Mackiwg Skype: WGMNZ1 Twitter: OERFoundation, Mackiwg -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]
