Yesterday the Charles Sturt University ICT Community of Practice had one of it’s regular afternoon forums, campus-wide, in meeting spaces, and via online conferencing. It’s a great way to bring people together from various faculties and disciplines. The focus in on sharing – not quite a PechaKucha, but close to it with just 10 minutes to share a few nuggets of gold!
As one of the invited presenters, my focus was on creativity and the use of images. This is based on the fact that I want teachers to understand remix culture (when it comes to images); use of creative commons and various sources of free images; image attribution; and visual presentation for blogging and creating presentations. With the 10-minute presentation I also included one of the regular updates that I provided my teacher/students in the Digital Citizenship in Schools subject to help springboard ideas.
The trick of course is to engage teachers from all ends of the spectrum of ICT prowess. So for the newbies, an introduction to flickr and other CC image sources is a must. For the geeks an introduction to tools like Alan Levines wonderful FlickrCC Image Attribution Helper is a must!
A lovely lecturer in Veterinary Science contacted me later to let me know she was excited by the ideas and would be weaving what she has leaned into her work. How cool is that? To be able to share across disciplines in this way is future learning methinks!
Around about this time last year I shared a post about Greasemonkey and Flickr for the adventurous. In this I’m elaborating on the wonderful tool, created by my friend Alan Levine aka @cogdog, which is a core essential part of my digital toolkit.
As it was this time last year, I have a group of students working with me on visual elements of online presentations as part of their exploration of Digital Citizenship in Schools, and of course I introduce them to the FlickrCC Attribution Helper for Greasemonkey. The reason for this is related to ethical use of online images, and the value of working with Creative Commons as an effective source of visual imagery.
Alan Levine has written a Flickr Attribution Helper – a browser script that embeds easy to copy attribution text to creative commons licensed flickr images. Greasemonkey is an add-on for Firefox browser. Once Greasemonkey is installed, you have the ability to add all sorts of magical things to the functionality of your browser. The Attribution Helper also installs into other browsers without the help of Greasemonkey.
Do take time to revisit the post to discover why this tool is fabulous ~ if you are not already using it. If you are using it – keep reading for an update!
Here’s the twist! A student asked me to clarify the attribution code found on some of my images. For example, if you look at the image in my last post, you will see that if as follows:
In using the phrase ‘the great unwahsed’ I’m not referring to the young Steve Jobs, infrequent bathers discussed in the New York Times, or even the rather disparaging term coined by the Victorian novelist and playwright Edward Bulwer-Lytton ~ who ultimately led to that phrase “in was a dark and stormy nigh’ being immortalised by none other than Charlie Brown’s dog Snoopy. (You should check out more about comic book legends and the back story to that doggy author)
But for me ‘the great unwashed’ and the proverbial ‘dark and stormy night’ may well be referring to the rubbish tip that is the internet. Wander in there too long, and you will indeed have a dirty mind and body
Seriously thought, this is exactly why teachers need to take such a considered approach as to how to integrate technology tools and digital resources into their learning and teaching environments. It’s also why such initiatives as Wikipedia have served to teach us how to share and participate in the curation of information. Wikipedia has come of age just when we need it to.
That makes perfect sense. Through user-generated efforts, Wikipedia is comprehensive, current, and far and away the most trustworthy Web resource of its kind. It is not the bottom layer of authority, nor the top, but in fact the highest layer without formal vetting. In this unique role, it therefore serves as an ideal bridge between the validated and unvalidated Web.
Teachers have also been using tools like Diigo and Evernote to show students how to ‘annotate’ the web and share information. While this works well on the smaller scale, it does not match the venture that Wikipedia represents.
Shared on Twitter, Hypothes.is may well be the next phase in making sense of the great unwashed information environment that is the internet. Of course, like any venture it might fail – but I think Hypothes.is is one to watch for now. Imagine…
If wherever we encountered new information, sentence by sentence, frame by frame, we could easily know the best thinking on it.
If we had confidence that this represented the combined wisdom of the most informed people–not as anointed by editors, but as weighed over time by our peers, objectively, statistically and transparently.
If this created a powerful incentive for people to ensure that their works met a higher standard, and made it perceptibly harder to spread information that didn’t meet that standard.
My recent visit to New Zealand has left me breathless with some of the yummy opportunities available for students across the country. One of these, the Mix and Mash competition is all about creative use of media. “Are you a crafty storyteller? An app developer? A visualisation ninja? Then this is the kiwi event for you”.
Wow! Check out the 2010 winners if you want to get an idea of what they have been up to including posters, cartoons, alternate music, poems, and many more supreme mashups.
I’d like to think that all teachers and librarians are clever enough to know how to work well with images to promote creativity in learning. My post-grad students working on Digital Citizenship in Schools have just completed a phase of their learning that included an investigation of how to find and use images in their work using free images online, and even using Greasemonkey and Flickr to speed up their image attribution. Media literacy is an important part of digital learning environments.
Media literacy education helps people of all ages to be critical thinkers, effective communicators, and active citizens. Media literacy is the capacity to access, analyze, evaluate, and communicate messages in a wide variety of forms. This expanded conceptualization of literacy responds to the demands of cultural participation in the twenty-first century. Like literacy in general, media literacy includes both receptive and productive dimensions, encompassing critical analysis and communication skills, particularly in relationship to mass media, popular culture, and digital media. Like literacy in general, media literacy is applied in a wide variety of contexts—when watching television or reading newspapers, for example, or when posting commentary to a blog. Indeed, media literacy is implicated everywhere one encounters information and entertainment content. And like literacy in general, media literacy can be taught and learned. Using images is just one aspect of media literacy educaiton – but none-the-less a vital one. Media literacy education can flourish only with a robust understanding of fair use.
Fair use in education means that educators and learners often make use of copyrighted materials that stand ‘outside’ the general use e.g. in the classroom, at a conference or within a school-wide setting. When this takes place within school fair use indicates flexibility. Each country has it’s own specific rules and regulations that apply to copyright. But for teachers, the aim should be not to teach or bend rigid rules, but rather to promote media literacy in action and help students learn HOW to use media to empower their work, and promote a creative commons approach to sharing and mashup works.
For this reason I was excited AND disappointed with the newest enhancement to Google Images, mainly because in my experience teachers have continued to turn a blind eye in this area of media literacy action. Google has announced you can now sort Google Images by subject.
To see this in action, go to Google Images, conduct a search and look on the left hand side for the search option. Directly under the “More” link, you will find the default sort option set to “by relevance,” click on the “Sort by subject.” The results will then shift and group images by subject topic.
Decorating print and digital material with google images is pretty standard amongst kids – no attribution, no use of creative commons materials etc. Your students may be different – but I’m considering the general norm that I have seen, and now the job just got easier!
What interested me most though was watching the video about this new feature. Notice how they’ve cleverly ‘covered’ the value of this new feature? You’d use this feature to help you understand a topic better? pick a better dog! and perhaps add a nice image to presentation at school?
Sorting just made searching a lot more visual. Yes. No mention of copyright, creative commons, fair use. No mention of th Advanced Image Search, and the option to filter by license. So there are rules…and they did not promote breaking them. But they did leave the rest of the job up to us!
OK – so I guess it’s up to teachers and teacher librarians to get the fair use message across, as part of our media literacy education.
Working with students means taking them on the journey of learning in and out of online environments. Let’s encourage them to apply creative commons approaches to their creativity.
I don’t know why this video hasn’t hit my radar before!
Often, you are in a great need for some pictures to freshen up your webpage and would like to include one of these images. If you want to do this, there are quite a lot of steps necessary:
Make sure you understood the license correctly
Get the correct HTML code for the IMG tag
Link the image back to the Flickr photo page
Give the author of the image proper credits (Attribution)
Link to the Flickr profile of the author
Link to the license the image is licensed under
Flickr currently hosts more than 75 million images that are licensed under a Creative Commons license. Depending on the license, you may use the images on your private or commercial webpage, or make changes to it.
ImageCodr solution
With ImageCodr.org, there is no need to do all this manually!!
You simply grab the URL of the picture page that you are interested in.
Then ImageCodr.org will generate the ready-to-use HTML code for you to drop into your online platform of choice.
It will also display a brief and easy license summary, so you don’t get in legal trouble because you missed something.
I know that students (and teachers) just like to copy and paste images from anywhere into anything. But we really can’t afford to miss the opportunity to teach our kids real digital citizenship skills even if it’s just about how to use images.
From small acorns, big trees grow! What seeds are you planning on help grow today?
This video aims to contribute to the design and development of visually stunning, fit-for-purpose libraries with learning spaces that support 21st century learning in extended school settings. It shows the contribution an effective library can make to the educational, creative, emotional & reading development of children and young people, and the aspects of design that can enable this.
Where is the one place in the school, where people come together, to share and exchange and swap, but do so with an expectation of academic ambition? It’s the library! Stephen Heppell
The school library is seen as the central space in the school for creativity, imagination and learning to be released.
Features Stephen Heppell with excellent contributions from schools around the UK. A very comprehensive rationale and presentation funded by CILIP School Libraries Group and MLA (Museums Libraries and Archives Council).
Though this video/DVD is not new, it is very relevant as we visit and revisit our future directions.
My recent visit to New Zealand has left me breathless with some of the yummy opportunities available for students across the country. One of these, the 
