Week 6 - April 14th: Taking and Sharing Pictures

This weeks assignment was also fun...but using Odeo´s service wasn´t an alternative because it was too complicated so I went to Switchpod instead. It was easy and I liked the interface of this service. You´ll find my Podcast on this link but it is also embedded at this page.

Week 6-taking and sharing pictures is just fun

Well...I´m really late with my assignements but I will catch up becuase now it´s just fun. I just uploaded my picture at Wikimedia Commons (se picture and information here). I also uploaded a bunch of photos, tagged and mapped them (se those at Flikr here).

I´m quite satified with my picture taken today in a clear and warm springday in the afternoon. I live right next to this pond.

I also found some other photos from Falun. The pond above are part of a World Heritage area connected to Falun Copper Mine. There where several hotos from the mine area but none from this pond that is quite important in the mines history.

Anyway. It´s feels in a way good to share pictures under the Creative Commons license and with the knowledge of copyright that we´ve read earlier in this course one understands that this is the right way to share our digital information. I´m looking forward to se what Wikimedia Commons will think about my description of the pond :-)

Week 5-WikimediaF: when the impossible can be done

I´m still amazed about the Wiki idéa and after reading the Interview with Beesly, Bauer and Naoko many of My notions about Wikipedia was bound to be reevaluated. When I read about the organisation and all those people that are involved in the monitoring of the information at Wikipedia one understand that this isn´t a little project for enthusiasts, it´s a huge organisation and controll system. My impression and conception was also that the more people engaged in a article the better. But when reading the interview they all say that this isn´t the fact. There is a interesting idea that some of the contributors are "experts". My question in...what defines an expert in Wikipedia....what do I have to be to become an expert?

In the article "The Hidden Order of Wikipedia" they examine the procedural side of Wikipedia which is interesting. One might think that the rise of articles and later Wikipedias strucure could be somewhat anarchistic but one understands later on that rather than encouraging anarchy, many aspects of wiki technology lend themselves to the collective creation of formalized process and policy. I think that many still think about Wikipedia as a place for youngsters where anything can happen...and happens where there is no control.

Finally I got acquainted with the Wikimedia Projects page and found Wikisource that I never discovered before. It´s similar to another project called Project Gutenberg and the Swedish initiative Projekt Runeberg which all has in purpose of publishing original texts on the web. Whith this initiatives We are in the beginning of liberating litterature and information that can make a significate impact on education. Wikisource has as a criteria that there shouldn´t be any copyright protected sources at Wikisource. In Sweden there´s now a new site that does the oposite and is named Student Bay in purpose of spreading copyprotected litterature but with commersial purposes.

Anyhow...all this Wiki-projects are just in the beginning in a new era of liberating information and in another ten years our education-resources will be more accessible and therefore it´s so important that the Wikimedia Foundation are creating all this project so that the commersial actors needs to reevaluate there approach to there costumers and the educational institutions.

Copyright och copywrong?

It´s quite understandable that the printing press and the possibility of copying litterature and other works easily makes people wan´t to regulate this. The issue here concernes money...as always. It´s so obvious that the easier it´s to copy somthing the regulations are getting stronger and stronger. We see this all to clear today when filesharing has become a culture and the movie and music companies are trying to prosecute every other little youngster that has donwloaded a movie och CD. It wasn´t that easy before to copy musik and movies when we had casette tapes and VCR´s. This is what interests me and when reading the history of copyright one can notice that technical advances hurry up´s the need of regulation. After listening to Lawrence Lessig´s presentation it´s clear that our history in copyright-thinking needs to be reevaluated so that the copyright-advocaters will narrow and lock in important material and only grant access of this information for those who can pay for the information. As We saw in the Walt Disney example the material has been more regulated today than it was before. Lessig´s refrain is important to remember: Creativity and innovation always builds on the past and The past always tries to control the creativity that builds on it. When thinking of this one understands that control is bad for creativity and that it´s shattering for creativity.

When reading the text of Ahrash Bissell and Jamie Boyle one see the difficulties combining policies and licences. In Sweden we have a speciell licence in copying books (not digital copies though) where students and institutions are allowed to copy some of the material in books. But nowadays when more and more of our information and litterature are digital we´ve seen that nothing from the other principles are usefull in the OER-discussion.

At our university we´re now trying to create an overall policy regarding the material in regarding lectures, powerpoint etc. but it isn´t easy and there are many of our colleges that doesn´t understand the benefit of showing and sharing this information to the world, or at least in Sweden.

I think that the Copyright discussion has gone completely wrong and therefore the copyright privilegies has been transformed into Copy"wrong"rights.