Who Is Important Here?

Posted on January 13, 2008 by Alvin Trusty

If you could choose three people as the most prominent people in educational technology, who would you select? This is the question I posed to one of my classes. I gave no ground rules. We have no text book with a chapter that discussions this. It’s wide open.

Pick three and give the reasons for selecting each.

If you think about this question in a different context, it could be easy to answer. Name the three most important people in the history of American government. In technology, it would be easier to list the three most important people in the world of personal computers or in the development of the Internet.

Educational technology is more obscure. The entry in Wikipedia wasn’t created until 2005, four years after most topics were entered. There is no standard introductory text that is used in edtech. In fact, most of the people I know in this field are self-taught.

It will be interesting to see the names that make the list.

Posted in edtech | Tagged | 4 Comments

Latest Apple Commercial

Posted on January 12, 2008 by Alvin Trusty

timemachine.jpg

During the games today I saw Apple’s latest commercials.  One says Leopard is better and faster than Vista and the other focuses on Time Machine, Apple’s new backup software.

It’s been a while since I have looked at the trends at W3Counter.  Back in October, Apple had a jump from from 3.79% to 4.46% in just ten days.

It looks like things have cooled down a little as Apple was at 4.56% in December.  During that same time period, Vista has gone from 4.14% to 4.74%, passing Apple.

They must still be on Christmas break because the last update was Dec 1.  It will be interesting to see how January looks with all the new computers purchased for the holidays.  My money is on Vista going ahead even more.  Any takers?

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PDF Hammer

Posted on January 11, 2008 by Alvin Trusty

Need to edit a PDF file?  Now you can do so without buying software or even installing software.  Go to PDFHammer and upload your PDF file.  Using the online tool you can delete a page, rearrange the order of the pages or append more pages to your PDF.

When you are finished, click Export and your modified PDF can be downloaded right from the site.

You can’t make text changes on a specific page, but if you have a big PDF file and want to pull out one single page, PDFHammer can do it without the hassle of installing special software.

Posted in edtech | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Copyright in 2028

Posted on January 10, 2008 by Alvin Trusty

David Pogue has an article about copyright and the views of different generations.  He poses a list of questions about copying movies or music and asks audience members to raise a hand if the they think the act is wrong.

He starts with “I borrow a CD from the library” and goes all the way to “I download a movie I don’t want to pay for”.

He says in audiences with a mixture of age groups, he has more hands go up with each advancement toward the obvious “this is wrong” end.  That was until he did this exercise with a group of 500 college students.  No hands went up until the very last scenerio… and then only two hands were raised.

I will try this one with a couple of my classes. Judging from remarks I have had in the past, I expect similar results.

Pogue’s final question:

Right now, the customers who can’t even *see* why file sharing might be wrong are still young. But 10, 20, 30 years from now, that crowd will be *everybody*. What will happen then?

Posted in copyright | Tagged | 1 Comment

Creative Commons from a professional’s standpoint

Posted on January 9, 2008 by Alvin Trusty

Here’s a different view on Creative Commons from Dan Heller, a professional photographer.  Dan sees the downfall of CC resulting from misuse by the little guy.  Here is the simple example he gives:

-A pro photographer places a copyrighted photo on a website for sale (his own, or a stock photo agency’s).
-A random 12-yr-old internet surfer finds the photo and places it on his Flickr photo stream, removes the copyright text, and gives it a Creative Commons attribution.
-A photo researcher at Big Company Inc. sees the photo and the Creative Commons license, and uses it in an ad.
-The original photographer sees the ad, files an infringement claim.
Even though Big Company Inc believed it was acting in compliance with the license, the law doesn’t allow for this defense. It is still culpable, and is subject to fines ranging from $750 to $30,000.
-The 12-yr-old is technically liable for Big Company Inc’s misfortune, but let’s face it—no one’s going to go after him.
-Big Company Inc’s lawyers now institute a policy of never trusting a photo having a Creative Commons license.

This could certainly be the collapse of CC use by big business, but I’m not sure a lot of big businesses are using CC photos in advertising for the very reason listed in the example above.  And I don’t think he is correct in saying that no one is going to go after the 12-yr-old.  The RIAA has been doing this very thing for a long time.  The parents of the kid will ultimately pay.

I understand photographs are a whole different world when it comes to copyright.  Just look at the number of photos on Flickr.  Heller says there are more than two billion with 2.8% of them being tagged as CC in one form or another.  In other words, in the amount of time it took you to read this last paragraph, fifty more photos were added to the CC library at Flickr.  With the number of twelve year olds using Flickr, one of them is probably doing exactly what Dan has described.

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