Thing 23: Copyright, Creative Commons, and Assessment

Discovery Exercise:

• Find an example or attribution that shows this program has been modified from its original.

Of course! I've been looking at it since January, at the inception of my journey with SLL 2.0. On the right panel of the SLL 2.0 blog, just under the red title box, it says "Content and style...have been borrowed and duplicated with permission, under a Creative Commons license." Linking to this page was very helpful, since I was losing my way just browsing around CC's site. It explains the type of permission granted--non-commercial share-alike.

OK, that's it. I am onto the online survey. I really like your suggestion to keep this blog going as a professional growth log or a site for my school library. It's been an investment of time and effort that should be sustained.

Thing 22: Audio eBooks and E Books

My school wants to do more with online sources of audio books, such as BookShare, for our students--kids with language-learning difficulties. In fact, the objective for our kids is not reading online, but listening, since reading is such a struggle for most of them.

I have been given the task of procurement--setting up and maintaining the accounts and getting the downloads for the kids. We have only begun looking, so I am thrilled to learn about LibriVox and World eBook, adding to my knowledge-base of ebooks and especially e-audio books. LibriVox has very clear help pages, which I have only just begun to read. It will be a great source for e-audio books in the public domain. I have not yet joined World eBook (doing so would allow me to search for specific titles) but I intend to, since a few collections in World eBook might be of great use, especially the Audio eBook collection. However, the fact that all the files in World eBook are pdf means that our teachers cannot edit them. They want to be able to insert comprehension questions and comments, a la Kurzweil 3000.

As with the Oxford English Dictionary, BookShare, Project Gutenberg, and Wikipedia, it is volunteers who are responsible for the sites' development, writing entries or, in the case of audio books, reading aloud the texts. I can see that amassing a database of audio titles will take much more human effort and time than amassing digitized texts.

I also linked to World Public Library, the parent of World eBook. A great enterprise.