Edutopia

Edutopia is a good resource for teachers and media specialists interested in "What Works in Education," as their description says. It is the Web site of the George Lucas Educational Foundation. It has articles, multiple blogs, and much other information. Definitely worth adding to Delicious.

You can subscribe to its free online newsletter or join for a nominal fee and receive access to free webinars and a print magazine. I just joined; I will let you know what I think. In the meantime, here is a blog post that supports several of the MILI concepts on teaching and learning together--Five Ways to Enrich Your Teaching Life by Heather Wolpert-Gowan.

Google Elements

Google Elements is a lesser-known Google feature. Elements lets you embed Google Calendar, Chat, GoogleDocs Presentations, custom search, spreadsheets, GoogleMaps and other Google content into your Web site by just copying and pasting some code. You can easily enhance your teacher/LMS site with student presentations, your class calendar, maps, or other Google content.

The latest Element is News. There are eight general news feeds (Top stories, entertainment, technology, World, US news, and others) or you can create your own using keywords. Like this News Element for Libraries:

Finding Images with Yahoo! Search

Yahoo has introduced new filters in its image search to help find Creative Commons-licensed images, although the term Creative Commons is not used in the filter. Use Yahoo Image Search filters to refine results to show only images that "User allows reuse."  You can limit to Commercial Use or to images licensed for "Remix, tweak, build upon." To find out about Creative Commons, you must click the Learn More link which takes you to the Creative Commons site. 

Google Search Options--Something New

Do a Google search and now in the upper left above your search results there is a link Show Options. Click this link and you are presented with a list of ways to limit or view results. You can see results only for video, forums, or reviews. Select results by timeframe. You can change your list view from Standard to images or more text, which can be helpful as you browse the results. You can click related searches and get a list of other phrases that might help narrow/expand your search.

Two other features are the News Timeline recently introduced by Google and the WonderWheel. The WonderWheel is a satellite-shaped display of related searches.

Take some time to explore these new features. Useful or not?

Paper Mills

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an eye-opening investigative article on paper mills. The article Cheating Goes Global as Essay Mills Multiply attempts to track the physical location of one company called Essay Writers by sleuthing through mail drops, phone records, and business registration from Virginia to Kiev to Manila and back. Fascinating.

Equally fascinating are the interviews with professors and students. Students claiming they only use the papers as research and professors expressing surprise and disbelief that such papers would be requested by their students. And one professor suggesting assignments be "plagiarism proof."

Recommended reading.

Are Librarians Obsolete?

I know you know the answer to that! No! Physical libraries and their staff are vital components to teaching and learning. And while I am a true believer in all things library, I am not sure I could articulate as many reasons as does this article from DegreeTutor Are Librarians Totally Obsolete? 33 Reasons Librarians are Still Needed.

Media specialists and teachers can use many of these reasons (see #5 and all of the reasons that mention the Internet) to bolster their case for school library media programs that provide strong instruction and collaboration.

The World Digital Library

The World Digital Library is a compendium of some 1,200 high-resolution digitized files that allows users to zoom in on ancient documents and archival photographs. The Library has a sophisticated search tool that allows users to browse by keywords, time period, place, type of item and the institution which contributed it. Descriptions of all materials are in seven languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish), though the documents, books and other components appear in their original languages. The World Digital Library is another resource for students with its mix of primary sources.

The World Digital Library:

....will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research.

US institutions include the National Archives and Records Administration and the Library of Congress. Other WDL project partners include cultural institutions from Brazil, China, Egypt, Israel, Russia, Saudi Arabia and many other countries.

Fair Use and the Courts

This is an interesting article from Ars Technica addressing plagiarism, copyright, and fair use. It reports on the results of a court case in which students sued TurnItIn on the grounds that it violated the students' copyright by storing their papers online. The students lost because according to a federal court decision:

TurnItIn's use was "fair" according to the four factors found in US copyright law, with most weight being given to the "transformative" nature of what TurnItIn was doing with the papers.

Plaintiffs argued that [TurnItIn parent company] iParadigms’ use of their works cannot be transformative because the archiving process does not add anything to the work. TurnItIn merely stores the work unaltered and in its entirety. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals felt that argument "was misguided." Their conclusion:

The use of a copyrighted work need not alter or augment the work to be transformative in nature... iParadigms' use of plaintiffs’ works had an entirely different function and purpose than the original works; the fact that there was no substantive alteration to the works does not preclude the use from being transformative in nature.

So, an interesting interpretation of fair use. The article describes the court decision as a "primer on fair use," providing another copyright resource.