June 2009
Picasa adds CC search
Posted by karen on June 18, 2009 in Uncategorized
Like Flickr, Picasa allows users to assign a Creative Commons license to their photos. Until recently, you couldn’t search for CC licensed photos, but now that has been added!
When you do a seach, just click Show options on the left side. Then click Creative Commons in the options and you can choose which type of license to filter by.
(To apply a CC license to photos you upload, click the edit button under Photo reuse to the right of your photo. To set CC as your default, to go your Settings and click the Privacy and Permissions tab.)
Thanks go Picasa and Google for adding this!
Open photos and model releases
Posted by karen on June 11, 2009 in Uncategorized
I’ve been thinking about open licensed photos and model releases. True, licensing and model releases are separate issues, but the discussion is relevant if you want to use open licensed photos that have people in them.
Some open photo repositories don’t deal with this at all (e.g. Flickr and Wikimedia Commons only sort of, while others (e.g. OpenPhoto.net) don’t include pictures with people.
I tweeted a question about this and Creative Commons pointed me to Joi Ito’s Free Souls Model Release. Great resource. And, of course, this is CC licensed so we can adapt as needed. Thanks, Joi!
Tags: creative commons | photos | model releases
OER at NECC
Posted by karen on June 8, 2009 in Uncategorized
I am really excited about two hands-on sessions I’m facilitating at NECC in DC this year. They both concern OERs, a topic that I am very passionate about, both for the opportunity to differentiate instruction and the potential to replace expensive and inaccessible textbooks.
In these sessions, we’ll be exploring open licensed photos, clip art and music; looking at open wiki-based textbooks; using an an open licensed kids dictionary; and creating and improving other OERs. Here are the times:
Open-Licensed Content: The Missing Piece
[Formal Session: Open Source Lab]
Monday, 6/29/2009, 8:30am–9:30am WWCC 152 B
Open Educational Resources: Share, Remix, Learn
[Formal Session: BYOL]
Tuesday, 6/30/2009, 12:30pm–1:30pm WWCC 151 B
I’ll also be in the 21st Century Media Center Playground on Mon. from 12-2 showing mobile technology tools that can be used to differentiate instruction and in the Open Source Playground (Mon. from 2-4 and Tues. from 2-4) showing open content and talking about how you can use this free resource in your school.
Hope to see you in DC!
Tags: necc | necc2009 | oer
A great leap forward…and another nail
Posted by karen on June 3, 2009 in Uncategorized
Forty-six states have signed on to an agreement to create common academic standards.
This is long overdue and could be a tremendous leap forward. It’s also almost inconceivable. Kudos to The Council of Chief State School Officers,The National Governors Association, Arne Duncan, Achieve, and other forces behind this.
In the curriculum development world, 50 sets of state standards has long been a challenge, to put it mildly. Having different standards for every state has doubtless added many hundreds of millions of dollars to textbook costs. (Texas, one of the few holdouts, estimates it will cost them $3 billion to change gears. How much will it save them in the long run though? Much more than that.)
And in an era of accountability and “leaving no child behind,” do 50 sets of standards make any sense?
Having common standards could be a real boon for the open textbook movement as well. Being able to develop textbooks around common standards that could then be adopted in one version by all states is a much more reasonable proposition.
The commercial textbook model is already badly broken. Most textbooks do not meet the needs of students. They are not accessible due to the input of overly large, special interest-driven committees who can’t say no to anything. Worst of all, they are expensive and state-mandated, taking funding away from other more effective instructional tools.
But textbook publishers have somewhat of a lock on the market due to complex legacy state approval and purchasing processes. Common state standards could be the beginning of an end to this travesty.
It’s encouraging to think that such substantive and substantial change is possible in the educational bureaucracy.
Tags: textbooks | standards
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