Joyce Valenza’s Neverending Search

The 21st century information landscape is rich with media and it is natural for students and teachers to want to incorporate this wealth in their own work. New copyright friendly archives are recognizing and responding to these educational needs while they remove many of the legal and ethical thorns.

Most students are aware that they can find huge number of images using Google’s remarkable Image Search. But the fact that an image is available to us on the Web, doesn’t really give us the right to copy it and use it indiscriminately. In fact, most Web images are copyrighted and licensed. Printing or using an image for educational projects is generally not a problem, especially when the student or teacher cites the original source. But republication or broadcast of that image on the Web, on a network, on cable television, or in a virtual learning environment–like online courses transmitted over such courseware platforms Blackboard or Moodle–generally requires the permission of the creator or owner.

The rule is–when in doubt, ask. But it is not always easy to ask, or to contact, or even to identify the creator or owner of an image. It’s possible to avoid these hassles. Enter the new concept of copyleft, a licensing which allows creators to maintain a copyright while allowing users the right to reuse, reproduce, and change software or files.

In the spirit of the open source movement, a growing number of new sites encourage the sharing of photographs, clipart, and other illustrations. I discussed this trend with Mark Thomson, founder of Yotophoto.com, (http://yotophoto.com) an example of this new breed of image archives. The site began as an experiment, as a way for Wikipedia contributors, bloggers, and students to find Wikipedia images more easily. Thomson noted that, “the images found within Wikipedia, especially the historical images, “are usually of considerable value and don’t usually share the same problems associated the Wikipedia text entries–reliability, impartiality etc. They deserve to be easily located.”

Yotophoto now has moved beyond Wikipedia, indexing more than 100,000 free images from a variety of other copyleft archives. “The spirit of Yotophoto, and other copyleft image sites,” says Thomson, “is the same spirit that drives the Open Source software movement, Wikipedia and the Creative Commons movement. People like to feel that they are contributing something to a community…It makes sense really: If you’ve got an excellent picture of a local historical landmark, why not share it with others? Why not let students use it their reports, or a local tourism website use it on their homepage? There’s a certain level of satisfaction that people get knowing their photos have been found useful by someone, somewhere. Additionally, with the recent advancements in digital photography, sharing photos is much more accessible to the average person than writing software code or editing a Wikipedia article.”

Among the other archives for copyleft or copyright friendly images are: OpenPhoto (http://openphoto.net/), is an example of a “photo community” offering a collection of “hundreds of stock photos licensed for free commercial and non-commercial use.

Pics4Learning (http://pics.tech4learning.com/) is a copyright-friendly image library designed for use in educational settings. Its thousands of images were donated by students, teachers, and amateur photographers.

The Open Clip Art Library: Drawing Together (http://www.openclipart.org/) is an archive of “user contributed clip art that can be freely used.”

Images of American Political History (http://teachpol.tcnj.edu/amer_pol_hist/), collects 500 images, obtained from government holdings and from published works with expired copyrights to support teaching.

Government agencies are among the best sources of copyright-free images. The US Government Graphics and Photos (http://www.firstgov.gov/Topics/Graphics.shtml), a slightly different type of image archives, functions as a portal to the various government sites offering images, with most items in the collection in the public domain.

For more leads to copyright-friendly image sources, visit http://mciu.org/~spjvweb/cfimages.html. Remember copyright is complicated; students and teachers should always read the small print and any special restrictions attached to an individual image.

Over the past couple of few months, I’ve caught up my favorite ed tech experts through their podcasts, guest lectured at a university using Skype, a peer-to-peer telephony product, created two blogs, and I’ve built a major project with my graduate school classmates using a wiki,  The world is exploding with new easy tools for communicating and learning.  I can’t help but wonder how we might use these emergent tools– tools authentically used in business and academia–effectively in our K12 classrooms.  

I chatted with Bernie Dodge, best known as the father of the WebQuest, who shared, “this is the most exciting time in my career. We have the tools to make a profound difference in teaching and learning and we’re only at the beginning of that process.”

Derived from the Hawaiian for “quick,” wikis are used across the Web as collaborative tools. Invented by Ward Cunningham, they’ve been around since 1995.  As finished products wikis are not flashy presentations. Users focus on creating, adding to, and editing text content using web browsers. Because they are browser-based editing tools, the technology barrier is low.  Wikis can be created and edited with little or no knowledge of HTML. Team-based by nature, they are logistically suited for group projects. Wikis are increasingly used by businesses and organizations as knowledge management solutions. They have also become staples of university courses to encourage academic collaboration and discourse.

David Warlick, educational technology consultant, author, and director of the Landmark Project, notes “wikis are just breaking out as vehicles for student projects.” Warlick sees wikis best used “by groups of people collaborating to accomplish a common goal, which may not necessarily be the end product.”

Wikis are frequently used as tools for collaborative authoring.  Their major advantage over the traditional notebook is that they prepare students to write collaboratively in a networked environment. Because they are Web-based, no one student hogs the project disk.  Everyone can easily contribute and edit. Teachers can easily pop in to comment or to monitor progress and see the variety and level of student contributions.

Wikis can be used to draft collaborative documents—classroom policies, simulated peace treaties or legislation, poetry anthologies, or recipe collections. Wikis are good vehicles for classes engaged in peer reviewed projects, and function as archived portfolios for classes serious about the writing process.  They can be used as focal points for class discussion.

Warlick suggests that elementary teachers might ask their classes to create wikidictionaries.  When students learn new words they add those words in alphabetical order to the class wiki. Throughout the school year the students involve themselves in building a truly relevant classroom resource.  Warlick suggested an idea that came up at one of his recent workshops. “If I were teaching high school, I would collaboratively produce a study guide for each unit in my class. I’d have students load their own notes and useful external content onto the wiki and ask them to continue to build and refine it as a real study tool.  What you would have in the end is a personal wiki textbook. Students would leave the class with a digital library of what they have learned.”

There are some downsides to wiki use.  They are by nature a bit chaotic, they are vulnerable to hacking, and they have the potential to inspire editing quarrels as groups negotiate content.  But wiki users note that the group itself tends to keep the content stable.

Wikis are geographically agnostic.  They can be collaboratively built by classes across the country or the world.  Or they can involve cross-age collaborations across a school district. 
Beyond student projects, in schools wikis can support meeting or inservice planning, with individuals contributing agenda items and linked resources prior to an event, as note taking devices during the meeting, and as planning tools following a meeting. 

Though he is truly excited about new communication tools, Dodge warns teachers to use them thoughtfully.  “What we’re doing when we rush to embrace blogs and wikis, seems to be self-sustaining,” said Dodge, who has seen teachers “forcing these tools into being curricularly useful. Blogs and wikis suffer from the same fate as most new technologies. Early adopters rush to embrace them without thinking through their pedagogical purpose. It is important to figure out what it is about the format that makes it better than what it is you were doing before.  Insert these strategies where they make sense rather than just adopting them because they are new.”

For a linked list of web resources visit: http://joycevalenza.com/podblogwiki.html

Adapted from my Philadelphia Inquirer techlife@school column