Infographics seem to be becoming more popular especially when people are having to provide a lot of information in a very limited time and space. There have also been several series of information books which are stylistically infographics and this seems to make the information more accessible to the intended audience. I first came across Piktochart earlier in the year when I was doing a MOOC about Digital Literacy. Whilst I managed to produce the short infographic shown above, I do not feel that I have got to grips with the layouts and the methods of adding to the page. It feels as if all the things that I have problems with have been left to the end of this course, but I really do feel that I want to feel more comfortable with their use. I suspect that they are the ones that I need to actually do with someone talking me through it, with me madly making notes that make sense to my brain. I feel several visits to YouTube coming on.
MOOC
Thing 19 – The legal side of things
Copyright is some thing that we are hopefully all aware of and yet I have always had the feeling that people are happy to slide around the regulations if possible. I can remember it being very frustrating when I worked in a public library environment when you had to tell someone that the could not copy their Ordnance Survey map or make 30 copies of a song for their Choir; they then went around to the local newsagent and did it anyway. There are similar problems in schools, although they do have CLA licenses which give them wider use than the general public. However, some staff seem to think it entitles them to do almost anything they want to do. School librarians need to be constantly on their guard in this respect.
Of course it is not just the written word that has issues. Images, music, even logos cannot be used without permission, but I quite frequently see slide shows with music and you know that it is probably copyright but they have just used their own CD to provide the background. Very frustrating. I have just done a MOOC on digital storytelling which was fascinating but which brought several of these issues in to focus. Most of the students used images from Creative Commons and used the attribution system for both the pictures and for any music they used in the background. It was surprisingly difficult to choose the right music in particular because even cutting off a few seconds of the theme could be seen as breaking the terms and conditions, so you have to be very precise about the attribution and the timings.
Basically, think of copyright as a bit of a minefield and be very careful to check what you are doing. The article on the Rudai blog was extremely useful as it brought us up to date in a concise and understandable way, so thank you very much for that.
ICT in Education
I have already discussed the growth in the number of MOOCs available for people to engage with, especially courses that link to the work within the education field. I am currently working through some new courses that might be of Interest and they are
Web 2.0 Tools University of Houston USA
ICT in Primary Education Institute of Education London
Both of these can be found on the Coursera website and are aimed at teachers and librarians, as well as other interested parties.
The Web 2.0 course looks at a huge range of ‘Tools’ that you can put in your digital toolbox and divides the materials into a series of segments such as
- Collaboration,
- Communication,
- Creativity and
- Lifelong Learning.
- Whilst it dealt with some tools that I had come across before it also introduced me to many that I had never seen. It also gave me ideas about how they can be used in the classroom.
With this course one of the great finds was a tool called Jing, linked with Screencast.com. this is on my dashboard and enables me to highlight an image or piece of text and then copy and paste to a file. It has already proved invaluable as it is so easy to use.
The ICT in Primary Education is particularly good as it is from a UK based institution and more examples relate to our experience. Subject areas include
- 21st century school
- ICT making a difference
- Pedagogical changes through ICT
- Technology Opportunities
- Inspiring examples and implementation concerns
I am currently only part of the way in to this but it is proving very useful. What I am finding is that the more courses I do about modern technologies the more they start to overlap and I get to use a particular tool in different ways. One of the real discoveries was a package called ThingLink. This enables you to take a picture and then pinpoint areas of interest which can have information, links to websites, video or photos attached to them. Unfortunately I cannot have the software on this site as it is a third party software, however there is great potential for a whole range of topics.
Futurelearn is just finishing a course on
Cyber security Open University
and will soon start a course on
Childhood in the Digital age, also run by the Open University.
The former was really intended for adults and there was an emphasis on personal and business security. However the information is relevant to all of us and I think that elements would be extremely useful for teens as they start to use the web in a different way, e.g. online banking, in the workplace.
The forthcoming course look at the effects of technology on young people and asks what the benefit and dangers are. It also looks at the world of education and how much should the digital impact on the classroom. It should make for a fascinating follow on to the previous courses. I am looking forward to starting in a couple of weeks.