Northern Kentucky University film students have collaborated with the school’s W. Frank Steely Library to unveil Creative Thinking, an educational copyright and plagiarism website for junior high through freshman college students.
Funded by a grant from the Cincinnati Bar Foundation, Creative Thinking films, lessons and activities are designed to educate teens and young adults about plagiarism and copyright law.
As part of the project, an NKU summer film class created multiple original short films. A project committee, comprised of representatives from NKU, University of Louisville and other regional community partners such as CET (Greater Cincinnati Television Educational Foundation), KYVL (Kentucky Virtual Library) and the Campbell County Public Library coordinated the program.
"Our Creative Thinking website provides both original film stories and factual expert speaker films to support the engaging lessons and student activities," said John Schlipp, extended collection services librarian and project director. "The films also provide pop-up graphical questions and statements to help students follow the content and allow teachers to pause the film for class discussion."
Although the lessons were primarily created to support language arts and history, the comprehensive website provides optional activities to support other disciplines. In addition, there are multiple types of assessment tools for teachers to use, including a fun intellectual property personality quiz based on the popular Simpson’s television characters.
The free website is now available at http://creativethinking.nku.edu/, just in time for the 2009 school year. National education standards from Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning and the American Library Association’s Information Literacy Assessment guidelines, as well as standards from Kentucky and Ohio, are incorporated into the curriculum.
To hear a WNKU radio audio interview with more about the project, visit http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wnku/newsroom/wnku_archive.html and look for title: NKU Students Produce Plagiarism/Copyright Infringement Film for Young Adults (2008-09-22).
