Here's a great thought from Sheldon about why flexible copyright is important:

"I believe that all knowledge comes from previously discovered knowledge, unless it is revealed truth then it comes from God when and how He sees fit in His loving kindness to us. I could see many good uses of such a program. Give an idea and let others advance it, then you can see what they did and improve it more yourself."

As I understand it, that's really one of the key reasons for the flexible copyright push--the idea that for society to progress in knowledge we need to share what we already know so we can learn more ... together. I make something, you make it better, and we all benefit. It's really a cool, unselfish and humble way of looking at things. As Sheldon says, nobody really creates new knowledge anyway -- it always comes from bits and pieces of pre-existing knowledge. Interesting that the hebrew word for "creation" really means something more along the lines of "organize." That's really what creation is -- reorganizing old stuff to make something new.

I'll finish my post with another cool quote from Sheldon about what all of this ethics talk is about anyway:

"I think that all these things mainly comes down to protection of rights. Someone who has an idea should receive credit for it (for instance my great grandfather actually developed the geiger counter but then Geiger stole it and patented it), you should be able to share your ideas, you have the right to access public information, and it is a right to be protected from unwanted material, viruses scam artists and such. I think the most useful thing to me was just to make me aware of all of these different issues. I had never really thought of exactly what copyright is or what I can legally use etc."

Techno Cheating - Be prepared, but don't fear

Great comment from Erin about our techno cheating discussions:

"One subject that seems to be the focus of many of the blogs is the issue of cheating. Perhaps we sound pessimistic, but I think that being prepared is key to being a good instructor. "If [we] are prepared [we] shall not fear."

I think she's right! If we are well-prepared as teachers, we won't need to worry about students getting away with too much. I read an article about this where the author concluded that the best way to prevent students from cheating -- whether with technology or otherwise -- is to know your students. If you know them well enough, you'll know what work is theirs and what work isn't.

I do think technology might mean we need to assess differently in the past. For example, you can go to Google Answers (I showed you the early birds this a while back) and for the for the right price get any answer you want from smart researchers who'll do the work for you. Well that kind of destroys the validity of send-home tests, huh? The proliferation of English papers online also hurts the validity of student papers on generic, popular topics.

But maybe that just means we need to test differently, or different kinds of knowledge than we've done before.

Just something to think about!

Look at you go!

Hey class, more kudos in order. Try googling "Technology Integration Wiki" and see what comes up at the top!

There's more to blogging than text ...

Blogs don't just have to share written ideas, they can also share visual ideas. There are blog engines that help people start photo blogs, just like we've used Blogger for text blogging. I've also talked a lot about Podcasting, which is audio blogging, and now here's a post on video blogs. To quote:

"Not too long ago Slashdot featured a post about photoblogs. It claimed that photoblogging is the next big thing, but really it has been around a while (notice how lots of folks posted a link to their photoblogs!). I think the next big thing will be VideoBlogging. Many have seen Peter Jackson's cool King Kong Video Blog, but you don't need whole a camera crew to blog using video."

If this interests you, find out about some of the photo blog, podcasting, and video blog tools out there and posts them as comments to this post so we can look into this more!

Students band together for fair copyright law

An interesting article from Wired magazine about students fighting abuse of copyright law by promoting more use of flexible copyright law and open source alternatives.

One of the really cool aspects of flexible copyright law is that it gives more freedom for teachers to let students learn by RML: Rip, Mix and Learn. Basically this process means a student rips a copy of something, mixes it to give it their own spin, and learns tons through this process of remixing and creation.

An example from the article:
"Pavlosky and other Free Culture leaders are finding clever ways to illustrate the importance of copyright in their daily lives with projects like Undead Art, which challenges students to remix the cult classic Night of the Living Dead, now in the public domain, and turn it into something new -- like a zombie techno video or comic short."

While I'm not a fan of Night of the Living Dead, I am a fan of this idea. Instead of having students learn about writing, or art, or music, have them create. For example, have them rework a famous mystery story into a romance, and learn about both styles of writing in the process. Or have them learn about Roman culture by remixing a popular song so it reflects typical B.C. Roman culture. Or have them learn science by recreating classic experiments with modern twists.

Don't YOU learn more by doing? So will your students. And flexible copyright lets us legally use more of the media available out there for these kinds of projects.

Great resources for making good webpages

Many of you have indicated that you think web design could be a very important skill for you as teachers. Well, Dr. Allen, who teaches another section of IPT 286, posted some great resources on her blog. These sites can help you know how to make web pages work, and how to make them look fantastic.

Design Websites

Here are a few websites that either demonstrate or teach (or both) good design principles:

http://www.lynda.com - an awesome site with all the latest tips and links to training companies and free resources, (tips on color, inspirational web sites (look in lower right hand side for the free resources info)

http://www.mundidesign.com - a site that teaches design principles (with interactive models), shows good examples of Flash interface design, and provides you with a change to try out different color schemes in a web page context

http://www.colorschemer.com/online.html - this online app lets you set colors while automatically generating related color schemes

http://www.webbyawards.com - a site that you can see all kinds of different sites that have won the "webby award" for good design
http://coolhomepages.com - the website that hosts the most effectively designed websites on-line (financial, Flash, educational, fun, corporate, etc.)

http://ucda.com/
http://www.graphic-design.com/
http://webmonkey.wired.com/webmonkey/
http://www.commarts.com/
http://www.lorrainepress.com/QandA.htm
http://www.elementkjournals.com/

Math CD-ROM you might check out!

If any of you are interested in teaching math, Mike Handy from another section recommended a new software called ModuMath. Don't know much about it, except that he liked it!

Why learning about ethics is important

From Lindsay:
This assigment has kind of grown on me. Earlier today I was thinking about how great it is that we are learning how are student cheat, what we can and cannot show in the classroom and other ethics issues. We are essentially getting the upperhand. I know many teachers who start teaching and no clue about how big of a problem cheating is. Let's face it, not all students or all people in the world are honest. When we out in the real world teaching I think we will be somewhat prepared.

Thanks Lindsay! Hopefully most of you feel this way. Ethics is sometimes dry and boring to learn ... but very important, especially since students look up to teachers as role models. If we don't show them that ethics is important, who will?

Update on what's due this week

Class! I told ya in class this week that the only thing due this week was your blog post about the ethics mini lessons. However, I said last week that I wouldn't grade the wiki pages until next Monday, just in case you needed extra time to tie up loose ends. Don't worry and fret over the wiki pages if they're done, however! I just thought some groups may not have had time last week to do everything they wanted to with the wiki pages.

Speaking collectively, and not necessarily individually (does that sound familiar?), the wiki pages looked really good. Learning about ethics is never really pleasant because it's kind of a boring topic. But I hope this was somewhat enjoyable and useful. It appears that you really got down to the meat of the issues on your wikis, and that's what we wanted -- so good job!

BTW - if you wanted that URL that I gave today in class for the interactive virtual world, it's at tappedin.org.
It really is quite a cool and useful tool for networking with other teachers with similar interests as yourself.

Blogs names a "must have" educational technology

Interesting! Nobody knew about weblogs a year or two ago, now an article in E-school News named blogging one of their "must have" educational technologies. Here's a quote from the article:

"Rolfes also touched on the growing importance of comprehensive student information systems used to track and monitor student progress, as well as the use of blogs as an increasingly popular tool for building stronger school communities--spurring much-needed communication among students, parents, and educators."

This would be a really interesting discussion for our class! What do you think are the "must have" and "must learn" technologies for teachers? If IPT 286 was only a one-credit class (grin), what one or two technologies do you think should be taught because they would be valuable to ANY teacher, no matter what their subject matter expertise is?

Speak up! I hope to hear your ideas on this one (even if you're from another section)! Be sure to give rationale for your ideas. "I think Excel is a must have because ..." etc.

Protecting yourself from Phishing scams

Well, since one of the groups is studying internet security this week, I thought this article might be appropriate that I found today about how to protect yourself from phishing scams. If you've never seen one, phishing is when a scam artist sends you an email that looks like it's from Ebay, Amazon, your bank, or something else, and asks you to click on a URL and go to the website to verify your information. You click on the URL, it takes you to a website that looks exactly like the real one, you enter your financial information into the website, and the scam artist has you. It can be nearly impossible to tell the real thing from the fake thing, so the general advice is don't click on any URL that comes in an email. Your bank knows you're smart enough to remember how to find their website yourself, so they won't give you the url in an email.

Why are we studying about this stuff this week anyway? Why is it YOUR responsibility to know about viruses, scams, internet security, etc., and why is it YOUR responsibility to teach your students? For starters, if you are taking them to the computer lab, you need to teach your students how to not mess up the school's computers with viruses. If they are swapping files with each other as they collaborate on projects, they need to not be swapping viruses with their peers. If they are supposed to do homework at home, they need to know how to not mess up their home computers. Anytime we do something on the Internet, we need to be educated about how to do it safely. The problem with the Internet is that scammers are changing their methods every week, so that's why as teachers we need to keep ourselves up to date about scams and how to protect ourselves.

And by the way, did I ever mention that blogs are a GREAT way of keeping up to date on what the latest scam/protective method is? :-)