EdVentures

Ethan Santa

This is an  image of a girl…

Visit us at our new home:

http://edventures.whitemountaintech.net

I’ve outgrown what my Wordpress.com account can offer. Turns out I want to play with widgets and scripts and such, go figure. But I like the Wordpress environment so I visited wordpress.org and downloaded and installed v.2 and imported, successfully, my posts from this blog.

So far, so good. I’ve got a long way to go to figure out themes and PHP but now I can experiment with my own installations - how dangerously exciting!
Here is the new URL and feed for my account out of my domain - www.whitemountaintech.net

New blog URL - http://edventures.whitemountaintech.net

New blog feed - http://www.whitemountaintech.net/wordpress/feed/

I’ve also tweaked the blog a bit to include the following plug-ins:

bsuite - a stats program courtesy of Casey Bisson

podPress - a podcasting encapsulation plug-in

Just a note, I plan on leaving this up until Wordpress decides to deep six it so any links that currently point here will not break. But if you do find this blog, please visit my new home and link to these posts there.

No sooner had I received the feed for Will Richardson’s post on his excitement over the first delivery of his newly published book then I ordered my own copy.

I have just cracked it open but I am excited about its prospects, particularly since I am working on a culminative project for my M.Ed. which is the development of a graduate level course in current EdTech tools. Between Will’s book, and the syllabi posted by Ulises Mejias in his Social Software Affordances course and Terry Anderson in his Emerging Issues in Educational Technology course, I am excited to start diving into the course’s creation.

Congratulations Will, and thanks!

technorati tags: will, richardson, book, blogs, wikis, podcasts, edtech, web, tools, classroom

Sorry for being incommunicado the past week and a half but the flu has worked its way through the family and has knocked me off my stride.

Today is a new day, a new start - and it is good to be back! 

At the end of this lesson, students should be able to:

• Discuss and defend their personal concept of netiquette
• Explain their philosophy of ethical network behavior as it pertains to:

• Personal privacy
• Legal issues such as libel/slander
• Intellectual property
• Copyright law
• Creative commons

• Explain the concept of the Creative Commons
• Identify and explain the different “licensing” levels that the Creative Commons provides
• Explain the concept of “open source”
• Explain the concept of “public domain”
• Explain the difference between a copyright and a patent

Netiquette

What is “netiquette?” Netiquette is a set of guidelines which help to ease the disconnect that can exist in online communication. Wikipedia has a wonderful article on netiquette. Albion.com has another good link.These are general rules of the road, but there are also more specific guidelines that cover such technologies as email, blogs and instant
messaging. Cyberjournalist.net has opened a dialogue on blogging ethics. Harvard’s Martin Kuhn has a paper (in PDF format) on blogging ethics as well. Rather than read the entire paper, focus on Appendices A and B.

Assignment:

Post a blog entry that details your own “code of ethics.”

Remember that we are expecting two posts a week at this point in our class.

Privacy

A topic that always seems to fire our passions is that of privacy. With the advent of the Internet, this has become almost non-existent. Whether the problem is offering too much personal information as in the case of many MySpace profiles or whether it is businesses with poor data management skills or even corporations falling victim to crackers, privacy and in particular identity theft is a growing concern. Wikipedia has a decent entry on data privacy.

USA PATRIOT Act

Sometimes concerns over a lack of privacy come as a result of legislation, such as the USA PATRIOT Act. If your eyes glaze over at the thought of reading a legislative bill, Wikipedia has a summary that might make a bit more sense. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has an article that highlights their perspective as does the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the American Libraries Association (ALA).

Automated services

Try to answer this question:

What are Internet or web “bots” and what impact might they have on one’s privacy?

Check this Wikipedia link to get yourself started.

Intellectual Property

One of the challenges any student faces is that over what constitutes fair-use of intellectual property. The U.S. Copyright office offers the legal standard, but the folks at Lamson Library have a number of wonderful books that deal specifically with copyright law as it pertains to the type of projects we will be creating.Here are a few more links you should check out:

• American Bar Association (ABA)
• American Library Association (ALA)
• World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)

Creative Commons

One answer to the vexing problem posed by the fundamentals of copyright law is the Creative Commons project. In this project, authors can assign a number of licensing options ranging in their level of restriction.Here are a few questions for you to answer:

• How many different Creative Commons licensing combinations are there?
• How is this different from public domain material?
• How is this different from open source material?
• What benefits can you see that might come from the expanded use of the Creative Commons concept?

Assignment:

Try creating something uniquely yours (it does NOT have to be very intricate) and post it to your blog. Give it a creative commons license following their directions for including the appropriate identification.

Thanks to the combined efforts of our Systems group and CIS’ own Alan Baker, we can now offer students enrolled in the Web Expressions courses access to the Dreamweaver HTML editor via Terminal Services. This will allow you to work on your web projects from the comfort of your own computer but bear in mind that we have a finite number of licenses. In times of high demand, you may find that you will have to wait until someone has finished their work and frees up a license for your use.

To access Dreamweaver, or any other application accessible via Terminal Services, map a network drive to: \\owl.plymouth.edu\afserv
If you should need a refresher on mapping a drive, check my last post. Once this drive is mapped, look for the folder titled TSClients. In this folder, you will find a number of shortcuts to the Terminal Services applications provided to you.

"I know but one freedom, and that is the freedom of the mind. "

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

My apologies for being this late but between a sick child and the power outage of the last couple of days it has been difficult to post. That
being said, here is your mission:

Given what we uncovered last week in both our class and at the Security Fair, and taking into account what you have discovered in your explorations, pick one aspect of network security and awareness and speak to it. Bear in mind that beginning with this post, we will raise the bar on our professional presentation and style. This means that spelling, grammar, context and content will be critical components of all posts from here on out.

For those of you who already began a post on the Security Fair, simply update that entry with an eye toward one specific aspect that held meaning for you. I look forward to reading your posts and encourage you to begin to take a look at the work of your classmates and post comments where appropriate.