Digital Citizenship and Creative Content Training at KCM
A Digital Citizenship and Creative Content Training was organized at KCM by the Microsoft Nepal. It was a four day long training dating August 9 to August 12. We had about 40 participants which included students and faculties from different colleges of Nepal (Kathmandu).
We started the program with simple questions like what is intellectual property, copyright and more. All of these were followed by number of case studies where we had a lot of discussions and views from different people. This discussion actually made us think about how, what and to what extent the copyright can come in use. The hardest part was “at what time or phase can you copyright your work?? When your idea, concept, beta form or the final product is ready??” We had different people, different thoughts and different justification for the same particular situation. These provided us lots of opportunities to explore not only our thoughts but also to understand the situation better from other people’s point of view.
As we carried on with other case studies on the following days, things got more complicated. The situation and people which we had argued to be on the safer side at the top of our voice, slowly began to change direction with new ideas and laws coming up. Most of the time, it was very difficult to have a clear cut answer. Gray shades could be seen everywhere.
Issues related to social media like facebook was the most complicated one to me. It actually made me wonder if I am allowed to upload the pictures I have captured during our training session itself tonight after going home in my facebook or not. Various aspects like protecting your own privacy, respecting other people’s privacy, what if some third party misuses the information in my network, should I go on taking everyone’s permission before uploading or tagging my friends’ photos and many more in a row were all getting into my nerves as we didn’t had any clear cut answer.
Fair use was one of another complicated matter. In was very hard to put a boundary between what is fairuse and what is not. Many a times, it proved that most of the illegal works are carried forward in the name of fairuse. And it was like, if you can defend yourself well then you can be in the safer side. But, as we learnt the conditions and terms defined in the “fairuse”, things got more clear. Atleast, it was a relief for things that we students have been doing like photocopying some chapters from a library book. But still the gray shades exist.
As Amrita, one of participant had mentioned,” there was discussion, discussion and discussion but no conclusion”. Every time after the discussion, we were asked to hang on to those thoughts and we were carried forward. So, lots of brainstorming happening everywhere.
During our training we also had presentations related to Digital Signature, SAM, EULA, Software keys and more. We also had a guest from US Embassy, New Delhi come in our last day of training, who gave us presentation on things related to patents, trademarks and more. The term patent was something really new to me.
Now, that we had come across a lot of terms and facts like copyright, patents, trademarks, fairuse and many more and also “copyright Act and Rules of Nepal” to play with , it was much easier to find answer to several unanswered questions.
Making Cartoons related to copyright, developing videogame concepts within 5-7 minutes, developing ideas to pass on the digital citizenship message to the public and the drama based on shortcut movie was all the fun. And, I am sure we all developed a lot of debating skills in us. Also, we interacted with many new friends, which was fun indeed.
Now, after all the discussions, presentations and conclusions that we had during these four days of this training, the best message that we get is no wonder
“Living Responsibly in a Digital World”, i.e. we all have to become a good digital citizenship.
As these training was “training for trainers”, we all believe that this is going to have a ripple effect, and we will buzz the people around for becoming a good digital citizen.
Ah…..still some of the questions seems answered to me and still troubling me somewhere. Hope with time and better understanding, I will be soon able to find out. If not,may be it's their nature to fall under the gray shades.