EDU 653 Week #1 Creative Commons & RSS Feed Article

Creative Commons is a valuable tool for the educator interested in using multimedia instructional resources such as digital storytelling, glogsters, prezis, slideshares, and photoshop images.  When using images, movie clips, and text for extraneous resources it is important to keep copyright and fair use in mind.  That is where creative commons can be a useful tool for clarity of fair use.

As stated in the article, "7 Things You Should Know About Creative Commons", copyright is "extremely complex" and covers a range of codes and laws protecting intellectual property.  Text, images, video and art are all stringently protected under the law in regards to use and replication (and rightly so).  What creative commons offers is a "gray area" whereby fair use and varying degrees of licensing are used to allow educators and those desiring to use content for educational purposes the ability to do so.

As is evident for the aformentioned article, creative commons offers openness and differentiation in licensing. As a "digital native" myself, creative commons offers a unique way of accessing and using content to engage my students meaningfully.


One RSS Feed Article on my Feedly account that caught my eye was "Seven Great Works That Inspired Geeks to Change the World" found on the ReadWrite Web by Brian S. Hall.  The article details seven works of literature that mobilized and inspired "geeks" to build, innovate, invent and improvise technology over the  last sixty years or so:

Omni Magazine
Neuromancer by William Gibson
The Shockwave Rider by William Gibson
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke
Hyperion by Dan Simmons
I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

The author posits that "geeks" - future engineers, doctors, scientists, techies - found their inspiration in works that outlined a potential future replete with holograms, one-room computers, the world wide web, and robots.  Each work was integral in inspiring the unlikely future that we live in today.  Most of the works are from the 1950s through the early 1980s and so all of the works are written without knowledge of touch screens, the internet and cloud technology.  Reading the abstracts about each magazine and/or book reminds me that the future we will know in ten years is future that is indeed difficult to imagine today.

Think about it:  In 2003 there was no facebook, YouTube, iPhone, or Twitter - mediums that shape the very world we live in today.  What will tomorrow look like?