Martha pointed out on Thursday that somehow when my blog was having problems at the start of the semester one of my oldest posts (the web20assignment) did not actually get posted (Instead it was posted to my other wordpress page on umwblogs for a different class… a complete mess I was happy to forget about). Luckily, I was just able to find it saved on my portable harddrive! So here it is:

Its really great to read that there is an active group of people striving to make more resources available for education. If we can find ways to make sure that these resources are still available for learning purposes I think that’s a wonderful thing. The crediting of the resource when using it seems to support the development of a responsibility within the system rather than systematic shutting people out from resources, which is pretty exciting to see.

In a world where there are so many different kinds of media and platforms for storytelling and communication, and furthermore a world with a resource such as google (which if you step back and think about what it represents to humanity because of humanity – it would be totally unfathomable to people not long ago), we definitely need a way to be able to use that and bring it into what we are doing and teaching. The way some of these applications we can use everyday can be used such as Facebook or Twitter to tell a story is pretty cool and something I didn’t really think about before this class. It does make me wonder though, where the line would have to be drawn in terms of using these applications to share the story. It sounds like Creative Commons is a step towards making sure these lines don’t hinder education.

I had definitely seen the words Creative Commons before doing this assignment but I never really knew, or to be honest that much cared, what it was or meant. I think its a really good thing to know about. Its hard not to hear about copyright disputes in the media concerning media today. With music in particular moving (unfortunately) into a predominantly digital age, online stores all over the internet have appeared that all deal with copyrights in different ways. It seems that most industry people want to keep everything really strictly copyrighted with all sorts of DRM to enforce it, regardless of how that hinders people from using, experiencing, or reusing the media that they purchased.