Week 3 Thing 7

Sheryl asks in a comment to my Cloud post, "do you think this forum, as it operates now, will be able to maintain its openness, or do you think that, over time, with increasing use and numbers of users, that copyright issues/conflicts will inevitably arise?" I think it's a great question. Copyright for me has always been a matter of balancing the rights of the producer with providing open access to ideas and I suspect that tension will remain with us. I'm excited about the current openness and wonder what new creative heights we might encounter if we openly shared ideas rather than closely guarding them as property. I'm reading a book "Wikinomics" and the author's primary assertion is that businesses today must move away from closely guarding their ideas to openness in order to compete.

I've been thinking about "mash-ups" which are multimedia remixes of content from a variety of sources but in a potentially novel way. In a sense my squidoo lenses are mashups because I have brought together content to provide a lens on a particular topic. Was the traditional term paper also a mashup of sorts (just without the multimedia bells and whistles)? Haven't we always built on the ideas of others? What distinguishes a good term paper from plagiarism? I would say that the author used a variety of sources, recognized those sources with proper attribution, developed a relationship with those ideas adding original thought or experiences, and composed a work that was readable. Those same criteria work for Web 2.0; we just have an explosion in access to ideas and to multiple media.

I sometimes wonder how we are changing our own evolution.

Week 3 Thing 5 and 6

2.0
Originally uploaded by Yaniv Golan

I've been playing around with using Flickr to find images for a presentation I have been asked to do about web 2.0 for a class of preservice teachers. I found this fun photo for my powerpoint presentation in the creative commons.

I'm working on a Squidoo lens to use as part of the presentation. The students will be in a computer lab so they can explore the web links.


click here to view my lens

Clouds In The Sky - Skyscape

Clouds In The Sky - Skyscape
Originally uploaded by janusz l

I've been blown away by some of the amazing images on Flickr. I have been exploring the Creative Commons part of Flickr because I have been concerned about the ease of using other's photos without permission. In a way it just seems one of the lovely things (perhaps a paradigm shift?) about web 2.0 is the openness and sharing of ideas, images, and other creative expressions.

Thing One and Thing Two

Well the Cat in the Hat would certainly approve!