MAC- Week 1, Blog 1 - Copyright Issues parts 1-3: 10 months late

In the past six days, I have read or viewed a LOT of material about copyright.  What is a LOT?  How about 15 videos and 5 articles?  You are probably asking yourself, "Why on earth would she do that?" My answer is, "Because, it was required for my Media Asset Creation course."

In part two, I asked myself, "Why didn't we get this fabulous information in month one or two of my Education Media Design and Technology Masters of Science program?"

WOW!  Unless you have gone through the material, you may not understand my excitement about this, but the videos were really good, and the information was so helpful, that I found most of it very interesting.

My favorite video is the creative commons video at:
http://blip.tv/creative-commons/mayer-and-bettle-1717461

There is so much material and information that it is hard to decide what to blog about.  When I began the reading I had the opinion that what I was going to learn was going to be boring and technical.  Some of it was technical, but very little of it was boring. I, like many others, have believed the myths about copyright infringement.  I find it very interesting that "free use" is not a privilege, but a defensible position. That in itself should worry most people. Other than copyright issues, what areas of your life do you willingly risk having to "defend" yourself in such a way?

Until this week, I didn't realize that copyright protection was developed by our country's founding fathers.  They really were quite the visionaries by projecting the need to protect creative rights for the inventors, artists, etc that would help expand our country.

This post may feel difficult to follow.  I apologize.  My mind is all over the place trying to process so much important information.  Maybe the Wordle image below will help show some of the important information I took from the videos, articles, and instructor commentary this week.

Copyright Issues Wordle by Cyndee Taresh, 4 May 2012

RILS Reflection

Looking back at the Relevant and Innovative Learning Scenario (RILS) process I can see what was expected better than I could during the process.  I guess that might be true of anything, but when I am in a learning environment that is being graded I like more information instead of less.  I don't like having to figure things out when there is a grade on the line.  I prefer to have solid instructions so that I can complete the task using my own "checklist" type rubric against my progress. 

That being said, this project definitely opened my eyes to how I could have done this better.  I should have written down my plan to see the flaws instead of thinking I knew what I was doing after a couple of readings of the material.  I learned a lot in my own RILS from the struggles of my target audience, then learned again from reading other RILS on Educator Studio and commenting on them. 

What that says to me is that this assignment is set up to provide learning through experience which is often more valuable than just following a checklist.  Overall it was a valuable experience even though there were MANY frustrating technology challenges within Educator Studio and some instructional issues.  Fortunately, our instructor was always available to help and to work through the confusion.

PB7 Links to RILS Comments

Follow this link to my comments on a Social Networking RILS.  Below is an image of my iGoogle page with my Google Reader and Diigo gadgets on it.  These are the three Web 2.0 tools discussed in the RILS linked above.

.

Follow this link to my comments on the UDUTU RILS for a great lesson building tool.  Below is an image of the UDUTU site. 

Final Project

Here is my Relevant and Innovative Learning Scenario Lesson Plan and Video.  I hope you enjoy the video.  This assignment was quite an eye opener.  I learned as much if not more than my audience did.  The purpose was to introduce a new Web 2.0 tool, have them create something using it, interact with their fellow students, reflect on the experience and provide feedback. 

PE5 Wordle

New discoveries in Wordle!  The more I play with this application, the more I love it!  This time instead of just randomly trying different things, I started out by determining what information I wanted to put in the Wordle.  I decided to make a picture of April 1966 world events according to Wikipedia.  I chose that time frame because of the relevance it holds for me personally, being the best month and year ever (except those of my daughters).

Next I opened Wordle and went to the FAQs tab to see what other people were asking about the process of creating a Wordle and the limitations they've discovered.  This was very helpful, because one of the things I have been trying to figure out is how to save it in a picture format such as jpeg or giff.  Using the FAQs tab answered my question quickly.  It isn't possible.  It can be saved as a pdf file or once it is saved and opened in a window by itself a screen shot can be done of it. Wordles can be printed and then scanned which would also create a pdf document.

Another very helpful piece of information in the FAQs tab was how to include numbers in a Wordle by going into the Language tab and unchecking the "ignore numbers" selection.  This was especially important information for this particular design, since I wanted the year to show up in the design.
My biggest take-away from these practical experiences (PE4 and PE5) is that Wordle is easily self taught if one looks through all the available tabs.  Once completed Wordle also provides html code for copying the Wordle directly to a blog or website.  I am going to attempt to use that function this time when posting my Wordle here for you to see. 

I am really looking forward to seeing what my "virtual classroom" students discover in their Wordle experimentation.  Below is the April 1966 world events Wordle I designed.



Now here is the screen shot version, which is much clearer than the copy pasted html code version above:

Here is another example of a Wordle I created from Herman Cain's Presidential Campaign website.  This is his stance on Education:

Here is one of the President's view on Education:

PE4 Wordle

The assignment of creating a Relevant and Innovative Learning Scenario (RILS) using a Web 2.0 tool of my choice is turning out to be interesting.  I don't have a workplace to incorporate this learning objective, so I created a "virtual learning environment" using a special Facebook page that I established just for this purpose.  I then invited my Facebook friends and family, and some previous co-workers to participate as my target audience. 

The tool I chose to teach about is Wordle.  I really love this tool and I believe it can be very helpful to anyone teaching any subject that wants to put words into a visual graphic to help stimulate learning.  The task of writing out the objective and instructions was not difficult, and getting the information to people was easy using Facebook and email.  I did some walk through of Wordle as I was writing the instructions to make sure I was explaining it well enough, so it will be interesting to see what feedback I get on that. 

Working in Wordle is very easy and it is just a matter of entering text into a text box and hitting the create button.  Then once the creation is on the screen changes can be made to font style, color, placement and background colors.  There is also a maximum allowed word count that can be changed from the default 150 words per design.  I've played around with the maximum word count quite a bit  so far.  More to follow in the next blog after I work on a few more tricks.

Below is my Wordle design of my daughter's eulogy to her best friend who died in an auto accident 3 August this year.  Taty spoke at her service and I wanted to do a tribute to Livi, so I imported the text from the speech she wrote and put it into Wordle to see how it would look as a picture.  It is remarkable, just like Livi was. 

BP6 Bryan's Music Blog

Here is a link to my comments on Bryan's music blog.  Check it out and see if you can solve his logo riddle.....

Blessings,

Cyndee

Bryan's Blog