The focus in your PV Studio blog (within the context of the media program at RMIT University) unlike much of your other social media will be on a ‘scholarly opinion’. This ‘scholarly opinion’ does not have to be formal, third-person writing – instead your writing can be explorative, speculative even experimental and written in the first person – but what it will need to do is concentrate on articulating ideas and providing evidence for those ideas.
Your aim in this course is to produce knowledge through your responses to what you are learning. This is different from opinions that you may make about someone or something that is not evidenced and does not present ideas and your thinking on things.
These blogs and the work you produce will be archived – documenting your collective, scholarly contribution towards understanding networked video.
Following on from the idea of ‘scholarly opinion’ writing in your blogs, in order to work with blogs from the perspective of a professional media practitioner, we need to consider copyright, intellectual property, and ethics.
The following videos are important for understanding the copyright, intellectual property, and Internet ethics aspects of blogging.
Copyright and Creative Commons
It is useful to understand copyright more broadly and in relation to what is referred to as creative commons. The media factory blogs have a creative commons license applied to all of them (see below).
What is Creative Commons? (5.19)
Why Creative Commons happened (6.37)
Blogs and Australian Law
There are laws and protocols specific to Australia for blogging. A good place to learn about these specifically in relation to blogging is on the Arts Law Centre of Australia website. Many aspects of blogging are covered here including copyright, defamation, and trade practices.
It is worth looking specifically at defamation and moral rights and defamation.
More here in the Legal guide for Bloggers by the EFF.
Australia has its own Creative Commons https://creativecommons.org.au/ website that looks at the specificity of working Creative Commons within Australia copyright law.
Australia has a Australian Copyright Council which provides more information on the specfics of copyright and how it works in this country.
Please note all media factory blogs use the following Creative Commons disclaimer:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors and in no way represent the views of RMIT University, the School of Media and Communication, or the Media program.