How to keep websites unblocked

YouTube is perhaps best known for its cavalcade of homemade performances and TV clips, but many people are turning to it for free tutoring in math, science and other complicated subjects. Math videos won't rival the millions of hits garnered by laughing babies, but a YouTube tutorial on calculus integrals has been watched almost 50,000 times in the last year. Others on angular velocity and harmonic motion have more than 10,000 views each. The videos are appealing for several reasons, said Kim Gregson, an Ithaca College professor of new media. Students come to the videos when they're ready to study and fully awake, which is not always the case in 8 a.m. calculus classes. And they can watch the videos as many times as they need until they understand. Benton. Original article in LA Times.

Our district does not block YouTube. We give it a very low priority setting in our packetshaper and we have had regular requests to have it blocked. But YouTube remains accessible to our staff and students.

But to keep it this way, we keep as many people as possible informed about its postive uses. See graph:

So far, so good...

________________

Update (Dec 19): Joyce Valenza at NeverEnding Search has a great blog post called When YouTube is blocked (seven ways ways around). If you don't have any ethic issues with violating YouTube's Terms of Use (and I don't), these are some easy ways to save YouTube videos to your desktop.

Your brave predictions!

The Pew Research Center recently released "Future of the Internet III: How the Experts See It."

Since they didn't ask me, I am not sure how they came up with the title. Anywho, here are some of the article's "brave" prognostications about the Internet of 2020...

• The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020.
• The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.
• Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.
• Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing "arms race," with the "crackers" who will find ways to copy and share content without payment.
• The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations.

  

• "Next-generation" engineering of the network to improve the current internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch.

To all of these I say, "Well duh!" These predictions are so 2008!

Blue Skunk readers, gaze deeply into your crystal ball, Koi pond, or wine glass and do BETTER than the Pew's "experts." Cripes, 2020 is what (20, take away 8, let's see...) about 12 (exponential) years away.

I'll start you off...

1. Equipment. No more clunky iPods requiring pocket space and thin white cords. We'll all be wearing glam geek glasses with the computing power in the stems, holographic images on the lenses, and cochlear implants wirelessly transmitting sound. (Those voice you now hear from the toaster might be real!)

2. Content. Paper textbooks and reference materials will all be completely replaced by e-books - all accessed online, most written in in a Wikipedia-type arrangement. Actually, short text will be the only reading anyone under 30 will do since most complex information and communication will be done via audio, visuals, and iconography. Read for fun? The same people who now think going to the opera is fun might.

3. Interface. Internet III in 2020 will basically be Second Life in 3-D on Virtual Reality steroids. Let's walk into the virtual library and pull down those audio books we want to listen to. Visit to the sexy librarian avatar. My daemon (a blue skunk, of course), an intelligent agent that follows me from place to place on the Internet, will always be with me and use my past buying habits, learning experiences, and mistakes (should I make any) to offer suggestions and advice whenever I ask.

See you in 2020. Let's hear your bold predictions!

Understanding Creative Commons Pt 2

This post and the previous post are a draft of an article I've been asked to write for a school library magazine on Creative Commons. I'm sharing the draft here hoping readers will add suggestions for clarification, additions, or other sorts of improvements.

If you can't take advantage of your readers, just who can you take advantage of? I look forward to your comments. Thanks - Doug

Creative Commons and why it should be more common (Part Two)

Implications for K-12 education

Consider these scenarios:

• A student needs photographs and music for a history project, but can’t find what he needs in the public domain or in royalty-free collections…
• A teacher has developed outstanding materials that teach irregular Spanish verbs. She has posted them a website and now regularly gets e-mails requesting permission to use the materials.
• The media specialist is frustrated trying to help his junior high students understand the rights that intellectual property creators have over their own materials. The kids just aren’t able to see the issue from the creator’s point of view.

In each of the scenarios above, Creative Commons licensing may offer a solution. There are three primary uses:

1. Students and teachers need to be able to find and interpret CC licensed materials for incorporation into their own works. Common advice given to both students working on projects and to teachers creating education materials is to abide by the fair use guidelines of copyrighted materials, search for materials in the public domain, and to use royalty-free work in order to remain both legal and ethical information users.

There are two main ways to find Creative Commons licensed materials. CC has a specialized search tool at <http://search.creativecommons.org> and there is a list of directories by format at <http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Content_Curators>. Both can both be effective. Google Advanced Search also allows searching by “usage rights.”

2. Teachers should assign a Creative Commons license to materials that they are willing to share with other educators. As K-12 teacher produce and make available course materials on the web, they will need to understand how to giver permissions. (Check with your local school district to see who owns the copyright to materials that are teacher produced.) MIT’s OpenCourseWare and Rice University Connexions, two formal post-secondary learning materials repositories use Creative Commons licensing.

3. Students should be required to place a Creative Commons license on their own work to increase their understanding of intellectual property issues. Only when students begin think about copyright and other intellectual property guidelines from the point of view of the producer as well as the consumer, can they form mature attitudes and act in responsible ways when questions about these issues arise. And as an increasing number of students become “content creators” themselves, this should be an easier concept to help them grasp:

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has found that 64% of online teens ages 12-17 have participated in one or more among a wide range of content-creating activities on the internet, up from 57% of online teens in a similar survey at the end of 2004. (Teen Content Creators, 2007)

Students need to know what their rights as creators and IP owners are. This may help combat the misperception that only big, faceless companies are impacted by intellectual property theft. A popular view is that it acceptable to steal from big companies but not from the small fry. Too often students and adults forget that many large companies are made up of small stockholders and employees. Publishing companies also represent the interests of individual artists, writers and musicians - whose ranks students themselves may one day join.

Developing empathy toward content creators who hope to profit by their work, helps all of us place copyright into context and perspective.

The legal aspects of intellectual property sharing have been outstripped by the mechanical means of copying and distribution. Understanding and using Creative Commons both a content consumers and content producers might help narrow the technology/acceptable use gap.

Spread the word.

Resources:

• Creative Commons website < http://creativecommons.org/>
• Creative Commons wiki <http://wiki.creativecommons.org/>
• 7 Things You Should Know about Creative Commons” EDUCAUSE <http://connect.educause.edu/Library/ELI/7ThingsYouShouldKnowAbout/39400>

Videos

• A Shared Culture <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DKm96Ftfko>
• Wanna Work Together? < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3rksT1q4eg>

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LuMaxArt_Gold_Guys_With_Creative_Commons_Symbol.jpg
This file is licensed under CreativeCommons AttributionShareAlike2.0License