From Siki

STUDENT RULES OF USE

These are rules of use for students in the Bachelor of Communication (Media) in relation to their individual blogs. These blogs are hosted within RMIT for the use of these students.

Your blog is a publication and all the laws and regulations that apply to publications (such as for books, newspapers, television, and radio) apply to your blog. You are responsible for all content that appears on your blog and you are its publisher. This includes all text that you write, visual material that you publish, and audiovisual material that you embed or publish from your blog. It also includes comments that your blog may receive, and trackbacks received from other web sites.

Students retain copyright over their blogs at all times, though all are very strongly encouraged to register and apply a Creative Commons licence to their blogs.

1. All students are subject to the terms and conditions of the RMIT electronic communications policy. This policy is available online via the Policies and Procedures page of the RMIT website. (http://www.rmit.edu.au/browse;ID=rc2q1qjc8ufaz)

2. Students cannot breach Australian law in any way in their blogs. This means (but is not limited to), breaching copyright, vilifying or otherwise discriminating against any person or group on the basis of gender, religion, sexual preference, or race.

Vilify means to abuse or disparage.

Breaching copyright means using material that you do not have permission to use and publishing or distributing this material in or via your blog. It is very important to recognise that your blog is a publication and you cannot reproduce things in your blog without the permission of the copyright owner. The fair use provisions of copyright which apply to education, for example where you can use an image in a student essay, do not apply to your blog. The fair use provisions are based on reproduction of copyrighted material in a piece of work (eg an essay) that is only to be seen by students and a teacher, and is never to be published in any form, or reproduced. This is not the case with your blog which is a publication.

3. On the home page (front page) of your blog your name, and contact details via email must be available. This is so that if someone wishes to contact you about material in your blog, for whatever reason, they can do so. It is recommended that you do not write your email in its normal form - studentID@student.rmit.edu.au (this runs the risk of it being 'harvested' for spam) but write it out in the form of studentID at student dot rmit dot edu dot au.

NOTE: some WordPress templates allow you to write your email address and an 'about' statement and to automatically include these. These generally do not allow your email to be harvested for spam and are appropriate.

4. All media student blogs must contain a link, on every screen, to these Rules of Use. (So simply adding it as a link in your blog roll, perhaps calling it 'disclaimer' would do.)

CONSIDERATIONS

If you intend to enable comments and/or trackback in your blog please ensure that you have appropriate 'plugins' in place. (Teaching and/or IT staff can make recommendations, and the most recent information will be available at http://media.rmit.edu.au/projects/wiki/index.php/WordPressFAQ#WordPress_Plugins).

Such plugins check new comments and trackbacks to try to identify spam. These they block, legitimate comments and/or trackbacks are allowed, and others are flagged for your attention. If you do not install or enable such plugins then comments and trackback should be turned off for every post in your blog at all times.

BREACHES

Where a violation of these Rules of Use has been identified the blog will be 'quarantined' by IT staff. This means it will be hidden from view so that the offending material is able to be removed. Any requests for that blog or its pages will redirect the user to a general page indicating that the blog is temporarily unavailable due to a breach of these rules of use.

NOTE, the entire blog will be hidden, and not only the offending post/s. The student will be emailed, via the contact details provided in the blog (see (3.) above) about the breach and given opportunity to log in and correct the problem. The blog will only be made visible once teaching and/or IT staff are satisfied that the problem has been corrected.