The Second Day

Inspired by Sarah at A Day in the Life blog I will put in some pictures of my computer lab on the second day of school. Believe it or not I do have a class coming into this mess today.... Oh well... I spent two weeks before school making sure that all of the teachers could function and everyone had equipment. It will all get done! Well, it is the weekend past the second day and finally I have gotten my pictures through the email. I don't know what went wrong. It is not all done, but things are looking a bit better now.

The little pieces of paper on monitors are marking the ones that are not working for one reason or another (no power, no internet...).

XO User's Group in Austin

Last night I went to the second XO User's Group in Austin that I have attended. Both times I arrive and then wonder what I am doing there. It seems that most of the people (all older men) who attend this group are programmers and don't really speak in a way that I understand. I am sure that I am as inscrutable to them.

Later Anne Gentle arrives who started the group and I start to feel a bit better. She is very involved in the project of writing a manual for the next XO Give One, Get One event. In fact many of the people who attended last night were here in town from around the world to work on this.

Last night someone helped me to update to build 711. I asked about Networking and they said that part of what they were doing is writing a thorough chapter on this in the manual they are working on. So far I guess the best way to get on is to be on an unprotected network.

Well, school is about to start.... got to go.

image from: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Porto_alegre.jpg

houses of Bryggen

houses of Bryggen
Originally uploaded by Farl

Here's How Flickr works when you add a picture right into your blog... This is a random, but nice image from someone else that I don't know. At least it gives them credit for the image and a link below the image in the draft view. It is called houses of Bryggen and is uploaded by Farl. If you click on the image it takes you to his Flickr page. I had to set this up through flickr to connect to my blog, but it does not only work with Blogger.com.

Also, I went to my own flickr page and found that I have the option of controlling who can blog my images. (any flickr member, you and your family, you and your friends, only you, etc...) It does default to Any Flickr Member though.

Flickr

In my quest to learn about images and copyright I decided to try to connect my blog with Flickr to see if I could put a perfect stranger's Flickr picture into my blog.... let's see...


This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Intellectual Property and Copyright

In the current issue of Learning and Leading with Technology the Poll Question was "Do Student's Respect Intellectual Property?" The result that came back to their poll was a wopping 94% that said NO. I am not surprised. For years I have tried to keep up with Copyright as a non-legal professional. Having digital content that is SO easy to copy and use really complicates things.

Now we are dealing with images, music, video, etc... The laws are so complicated and so the majority of students (and teachers!) ignore them. Teachers are used to dealing with text plagarism and so they tend to be much more concerned that something be in a student's words and clue into when text has been copied directly from another source. Most educators have clear ideas about what needs to be sited when it comes to text.

The issue with images, music and other multimedia is much more confusing. Add to that the fact that many kids see NO problem with downloading music, movies or TV shows that are copyrighted and sharing them and the whole idea of Intellectual Property and copyright muddies. A while ago I created a web page about copyright with the idea that teachers just needed a very clear and simple way to look at it. Copyright for Educators suggests these things:

1. Check for copyright notices at the bottom of web pages.

2. Never put copyrighted material up on the web without permission.

3. If in doubt ask for permission.

1. Check for copyright notices at the bottom of web pages.

2. Never put copyrighted material up on the web without permission.

3. If in doubt ask for permission.

4. Create your own graphics.

5. Always give credit to the original creator of anything you use.

6. Use a Creative Commons License on your own work, especially if you want to share.

4. Create your own graphics.

5. Always give credit to the original creator of anything you use.

6. Use a Creative Commons License on your own work, especially if you want to share.

Recently I was looking for an image for this blog and I was shocked. I decided to see what there was in Google Images. Now that there are tons of blogs it is very easy to see the same image used over and over again. Try searching for any commonly known image and you will get 100,000's of hits many of which are on blogs or MySpace pages. What is our responsibility as teachers? Is it getting impossible to monitor fair use and therefore less important to worry about copyright? What about your own content? If you are a photographer, artist, musician or have a particularly interesting blog is it OK if others copy and use your creations?

I have no answers, but these are important questions. An interesting blog post on the subject is What to do when Someone Steals your Content at Lorrell on Wordpress Blog. I really am interested in your experiences and thoughts about this.

Also, there are some great links on the bottom of this blog entry. One of them leads to a blog called Plagerism Today and here is a link to what the writer has to say about Photobucket.