Useful resources for the start of term

Term has started and all hands are to the deck!

I've had a number of requests about a couple of different topics over the past couple of weeks, so this post is really just about pointing you towards a couple of useful things.

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1) Access to Moodle areas is controlled via the Staff Access Webform. Unit Leaders can enrol other colleagues to their areas here.

2) I'm sure everyone has already rolled their units over from last year, but this guidance is always useful to keep at hand...

3) This short post is largely based on student feedback, and demonstrates some good practice for the development of Moodle areas, to help keep them structured and organised.

4) Moodle has a range of excellent features. Having the ability for students to sign up to things - for group work or tutorial slots for example, can be a great facility.

5) As many people will know, we really shouldn't be uploading the PDF versions of journal articles into Moodle. This guidance produced by colleagues in the library talks through getting stable links to share with students.

6) This guidance on finding images on the web helps overcome the ongoing problem of copyrighted images and introduces the Creative Commons licenses.



This work by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Finding images on the web

Increasing attention is being brought to the common activity of searching Google Images to find and reuse useful photographs/artworks/etc in teaching and learning materials. The real problem with this, is that the authors of the images may not be happy for you to actually reuse their work - it's not too different-a-concept to referencing academic works really...

So what can we do about it? 

Well there are various sites you can use to find images that you can safely reuse. These images might be licensed under Creative Commons licenses (this post introduces these), or might even be Royalty-free (meaning you don't even have to attribute the author).

This tutorial from JISC Digital Media on Using the Internet for Image Searching is particularly useful as it goes through 4 stages of Judge, Discover, Tour, and Success (see image below); as well as their advice for Finding Video, Audio and Images Online.

Image taken from jiscdigitalmedia: Finding Video, Audio & Images Online

The latter of these examples suggests a number of sites for finding both collections of images specifically for Education (which appear particularly useful for historical images in all fields) as well as Creative Commons and other free collections. Some of these include;

Everystockphoto - searches across several free-to-use image sites (incl Flickr's Creative Commons images - see below)

Flickr - Creative Commons advanced search - use Flickr's advanced search page to include only photos (or short video clips) that have a Creative Commons licence. See also our advice document Finding Images on Flickr

Flickr - The Commons - a number of publicly-held photographic collections from around the world use Flickr to share images that have 'no known copyright restrictions'

I particularly like the ability to search multiple collections using the search feature from creativecommons.org, but you can easily check out the links to specific collections above, and don't forget you can also use Google's Advanced Search to find images suitably licensed - this short video shows you how you can filter the search....

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As somewhat of an aside, concepts such as Creative Commons are directly associated to the Open Content Movement, allowing educators and self-learners to reuse existing content. This Introduction to the Open Content Movement will provide a useful starting point to understand the movement, along with this post introducing the Creative Commons licenses. You'll be reusing videos from MIT and Stanford in no time :-)

If you would like to discuss any of these points, feel free to get in touch.



This work by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Using Flickr to share images

Last week a student asked me if there was any central repository of images of the University (buildings, lecture theatres, labs, etc) that can be reused and embedded into coursework. I'm not sure if there is, so thought we could start one ourselves, which would help them, but also help many other students. It might also educate them a little around issues to do with copyright, and in particular, the Creative Commons licenses (I've done a separate post about CC here).

So Flickr has many facets: Sets, Groups, Gallaries, etc. I have opted to create a Public Group (although you can have different permissions, such as 'invite-only groups' if you want something a little more private), and I am the lead Moderator and Administrator for the group - if needed, it's easy enough to give other people Moderator access as well.

Students can easily join the group - Multimedia @ MMU - from the group page: http://www.flickr.com/groups/mmu_mm/ (the URL is customisable). Once part of the group, members can then upload their own photographs to the 'Group Pool'.

Easy!

I have then used FlickrSlidr, a simple 3rd party tool to embed a slideshow of the images into my Moodle area. All in all, it took me about 45 minutes, and that included researching the different aspects of Flickr as I'm not really a power user! Take a look at the slideshow below - bare in mind it's only just been created, so will hopefully start to develop over the next few weeks.



Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

I mentioned the Creative Commons licenses above - they are gaining increasing attention with the significant investment into Open Education Resources across the sector (but that's a separate post). I took a short time in class to introduce the concept of Creative Commons to students, and encouraged students to make the Creative Commons Attribution license the default for photographs they upload to Flickr (can be applied from their account preferences). This means they can be searched for from Flickr's dedicated Commons pages, and can be reused by anyone, as long as they attribute the original author.

I'm happy for other staff/students to join the group and participate in building or reusing the images we generate, and of course if you're interested in implementing this yourself, I'm happy to lend a hand.

Are you doing anything interesting related to sharing images or any other works amongst students? If so, leave a comment.


This work by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.