This week introduced us to Animoto, a kind of movie/slideshow presentation tool. As you would see in my other posting this week, I gave a less than glowing review of this resource. I can say one thing for sure; Animoto is not making its way on to my PLE. I won't go into huge detail here again, but I found it very cumbersome and far behind other presentation tools that we have available to use.
I have worked with Prezi in the past, and there seems to be a trend happening where it slowly overtakes PowerPoint as the primary presentation tool. It just has this professional looking element to it, with a more modern and "flowing" theme to it. I highly recommend working with Prezi a little bit to get a feel for it. More and more it will be the norm in both the business and academic world.
The main theme of this week was Copyright. Copyright has always seemed like a bit of a tricky thing in my mind. As a student, I have always assumed that so long as I cite where I retrieved the information from, and use it only for academic and non-commercial reasons, any and all information or images on the internet is available. Media Dates (n.d.) somewhat confirmed this, and listed the six legitimate uses of copyrighted material: research, private study, criticism/review, new reporting, parody/satire, and education. However, is it ok to use images posted on the internet without asking permission from the owner, when they explicitly request that you ask first?
While I think that, so long as it is for one of those six reasons, legally you are safe to use the content without permission, part of being a responsible Digital Citizen is respect. If someone requests that you seek permission first, we should honour that, and respect their decision if the answer is no. Although I love the phrase "it's easier to ask for forgiveness rather than permission", it's not the motto we should live by as an online community. Respect the wishes of other Digital Citizens. Besides, I imagine most of the time they would have no problem with you using their content, so long as you acknowledge where it came from.
From Feedly this week, one of Obama's big goals for this term appears to be slipping away. The Obama administration has veered sharply from his predecessor when it comes to dealing with Iran. Where the US has traditionally tried to keep a tight lid on Iran's nuclear ambitions, Obama has gone for negotiation and reconciliation. Although opposed by the Republicans and Israel, Obama has led the charge of the 5+1 nations attempting to strike a nuclear deal that will end Iran as a nuclear threat in exchange for sanctions lifting. However, as the deadline gets closer, the odds of that deal happening appear to be slipping away. Iranian officials announced that they would not agree to a key aspect of the deal, namely that they would not sell their stocks of atomic fuel out of the country. The purpose of this was to guarantee that it could not be militarized, and Iran had supposedly been going along with this until now. Will Obama be able to get the deal back on track? Or will the Republicans be the ones with the last laugh? Check out the article here: http://nyti.ms/1DihnCI
Hey Matt,
ReplyDeleteI agree with you on what you said about copyright although I never knew about the six legitimate use of copyright. It's interesting to know that permission for copyright is not needed to access any of the six mentioned. Also great post from your Feedly, I found it very useful.