CIL test changing next year
The ethics portion of the Computer and Information Literacy test, required for USU graduates, is going to be changed before the upcoming school year, said CIL director Rob Barton.
Barton said 25 percent of the students who take the CIL fail their first time. Some of the most missed questions come from the ethics portion of the test, which includes questions on fraud, copyright, private information and plagiarism. The copyright portion is the area Barton said he would be focusing most of the changes on.
Right now the study guide for the CIL defines copyright as the rights possessed by the author of a work. The rights of the author include copying, reselling, leasing, lending, renting and/or distributing the material.
Heather Day, a student at USU, said she doesn’t know as much as she should about copyright laws or information. Heather said she knew the primary rule concerning copyright, giving credit to the source of the information.
Another student, Melanie Jacobson, said copyright is a legal document that prevents someone from copying others’ material, and it is a federal law.
Barton said it is interesting to show students what the correct use of intellectual content is in the classroom because of exceptions to the rule. There is so much gray area surrounding copyright rules it’s hard to know if something is illegal, Barton said. Copyrights are changing so extensively the CIL exam needs to be updated so students know what’s available to them.
One of the gray areas Barton mentioned is the use of a newer software licensing called open source. This allows people to use and manipulate information without paying for it. Commercial software, predominate in the past, requires you to pay for use of it and also pay for any changes you make to the software, Barton said.
An example of an open source site on the USU campus is OpenCourseWare. It has 50 different courses including a syllabus, video, images and study guides. OCW allows anyone to use the material presented as long as the user follows these guidelines. First the user has to use the information non-commercially. Second, the user must attribute the materials to the publishing institution. Finally, if the user changes the content, it must also be offered freely and openly under these same guidelines.
David Wiley, an instructor for the instructional technology department, is giving a lecture on copyright and open sources Thursday in the Education Building Room 282 at 8 a.m. Wiley said students don’t know people are working hard to give them information through these open sources.
You can find open source all over the Internet in Google, Flicker and Yahoo, Wiley said. Copyright laws aren’t changing; people are maneuvering the law against itself using a copyright to get around copyright, Wiley said.
The new CIL test will include open sources and where the student body can find them. These open sources are another resource for students at USU.
-mmissyb@cc.usu.edu