This weeks readings and resources on fair use, intellectual property, and accessibility were very interesting. I liked Ko & Rosen’s overview in chapter 8 and especially noted down their criteria for fair use. Portion limits seem to me to be overly confining.
Lessig’s TED Talk on creativity had me reflecting on how behind government, etc. is when it comes to intellectual rights in the age of the internet. It reminds me of governments trying to catch up to the massive changes caused by the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. I also was impressed with his PowerPoint presentation (or whatever he was using). I liked the short bursts of key words, repetition of words to hammer in key ideas and the use of film. I’d love to know how he put it together and what software he was using.
The accessibility website was a bit intimidating. So much information, checklists, etc. I realized that I have a lot of work to do when it comes to making all of my materials more accessible. Time has been a great factor in not being able to make all of my materials compliant. For example, I’ll make some image and map changes to a PowerPoint and not put in alt-text for them. I’ll have to go back trough all of my posted presentations to fix that. Another issue is transcripts. Creating transcripts for videos is extremely time consuming. I wish there were better automatic closed captioning software out there. Since I use Blackboard I’m also going to look into what types of accessibility tools are built into the platform.
The fun part of this week was to look at all of the OER links. There is a surprising amount public domain materials out there to be used. I’ve been using Wiki-media Commons for awhile for images and my favorite primary source site for history is the Fordam University Internet History Sourcebook. This is a great resource but also shows some of the pitfalls of these sites. It appears that little is being done to improve it over the last few years. Many links to sources are broken. My guess it that there is a lack of funding-if I win the lottery… This site would also be better if they had all of the documents on their server rather than have to link to other institutions, etc. I’m really impressed with the Internet Archive and have found some great videos to embed into some of my lectures. I’m also a big fan of Project Gutenberg and have already filled my iPad with many books. Gutenberg is especially strong on 19th century translations of Classical works. I just re-read Heart of Darkness for possible use in my World History II course in the unit on Imperialism and its there for free.