A lot of educators have heard of Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig’s brainchild, but fewer are clear on exactly what it actually does and allows. Some mistakenly think it’s a place where anything goes; at the other end of the spectrum, some may find the task of approaching anything that comes close to copyright quicksand as too much of a hassle and just avoid it altogether. For those that fall into either of these two groups, Rod Lucier has a nice presentation specifically tailored towards teachers that breaks down the essentials of how to use it. Although it’s 20 minutes long, it’s a very clear walkthrough, and so if you’re new to Creative Commons, it’s definitely worth watching.
To get you on your way, he also points to some sites that specifically participate in the Creative Commons licensing system – Flickr, Blip, and ccMixter. New to me was the music source, OPsound.
I’ve been experimenting with another one of those highly addictive Firefox extensions; this one is called Feedly and I like it quite a bit. It’s got a snazzy, light UI and makes it easy to get a quick snapshot of some of the most active feeds in your news aggregator by pulling from your Google Reader and Twitter accounts. It also comes with various modules that allow you to configure Twitter posts, YouTube, and Flickr. You can even enter hexadecimal values if you want to customize the background color and link colors (read and unread). There are, of course, lots more options under the Preferences section.
The Unofficial Apple Weblog reports that iTunes U has reached 100 million downloads. Given this number, I’m curious as to what’s happening post-download: how many people are researching how iTunes U resources are being used? What kinds of effects do they seem to have on learning, especially in Distance Ed environments? One interesting example is from Dani McKinney of SUNY-Fredonia who found a positive effect when it came to taking an exam.
New Media Literacy … What is it? How do you define it? This is one of those terms that’s been used so much that it’s become kind of a generic catch-all for anything that relates to learning environments that incorporate Web 2.0 apps. The New Media Literacies Project has a video that defines it in terms of words such as negotiation (e.g., moving into/across different spaces), appropriation (e.g., remixing), and play (e.g., experimenting with/in surrounding environment).
As they lay out this definition, they tend to peg it to the word skills, which seems to me a little too reductionist and more reminiscent of industrial-age learning environments. Instead, I like the alternative they bring in towards the end, competencies, which, as Henry Jenkins says in the video, doesn’t restrict it to just education and workplace contexts, but citizenship and creative expression.
A quick follow-up on my previous post: I regularly read Doug Belshaw’s blog because he covers a variety of things related to educational technology and teaching. On top of that good stuff, he also shares some of what he’s doing in terms of his graduate thesis (dissertation). In many ways, I find the informal sharing of research through blog posts to be more valuable than what I’d get from a conventional academic conference. At the typical conference, I get the highlights, which can be valuable in certain situations, but with blogs, I get more insights into processes that led to the highlights.
Jeffrey Keefer has an interesting post on doc students using the blog to share or chronicle their academic/research journey (e.g., Why do this via a blog? How does it feel to be public with your thinking?). At the end of his post asks, I wonder if there is a research problem and question in here?.
I think there is. One angle might be reluctance. Blogs often represent a person’s fragmented, truncated, rough-hewn thinking on something. They’re not something that’s polished and subjected to numerous R&R cycles as is the case with traditional journal publishing. But I think that precisely because the research journal has been the dominant model in higher ed for so many years that it’s difficult for some to bring the messy, fragmentary thinking that leads into those more polished journal pieces out into the open. For the reluctant doc student, there is the question of value: what value do I get by sharing my fragmented, iterative thinking? Will it go into a community? How active will the community be in reciprocal sharing?
As we roll towards final exams, I’ve been noticing the usual up-tick in library use by students. Not necessarily for books, but for group work and study spaces. And this got me thinking about some previous posts I wrote on some interesting modular design experiments at the University of Minnesota and the University of Missouri-St. Louis where it’s less about the institution providing lots of desktop computers and individual work stations, which massive adoption of mobile devices has essentially made obsolete, and more about a space that accommodates the need to present and share.
I think one of the emerging trends, if not already, among university libraries is that it’s going to be more about open spaces than stacks. With the expanding number of journals being ported to online databases, the growing presence of e-books, and of course, the ubiquitous, general-purpose search engine, students will have ready access to high-quality materials. What seems to be more of a need though is a greater number of spaces where students can informally organize group meetings to hash out a project or find a quiet alcove for concentrated study.