Multilitteratus Incognitus

Disclaimer/Heads-up: This is a short post connected to my work on the Creative Commons Workshop (aka “mini book report” or “homework”). It’s not meant to be an exhaustive copyright analysis, nor legal advice. Reader discretion is advised. Oh yes - this is also licensed under CC-BY 4.0 😃 For this final post for CC-Cert will look briefly at Greece, specifically with regard to Copyright and Creative Commons usage. Πνευματική ιδιοκτησία (intellectual property) or πνευματικά δικαιώματα (intellectual rights) are the Greek terms for denoting copyright, as well as the borrowed term “copyright” itself. The entity, in Greece, that “guards” the rights of IP holders is the Hellenic Copyright Organization (OPI) “ supervises the operation of the system for protecting the authors and the related rights rightsholders; safeguards the rights of the users and the public; balances the interests of copyright sectors with those of industrial property sectors; incorporates and adjusts in Greece t...

This blogpost is connected to my participation in this fall’s Creative Commons Certification course . The track that I picked was the educator track, but I’ll deviate a bit from the traditional educator track♦ and put on the hat of a college administrator♥. In my day job, I am the main administrative person for an online master’s program. To borrow a phrase - the “Soup to Nuts” guy for my program.  I am there when prospective students ask questions about our program, help shepherd them through the admissions process if our program is the right fit for their needs, help guide them through the program, and see them through to graduation. Sometimes I am also the alumni contact.  That’s not to say I am alone in this endeavor, there are many people who are part of this intricate machine: from faculty who teach courses, to colleagues at the Registrar’s office who actually schedule courses, colleagues in Admissions, and even other students in the program who help provide an...

I posted a link to the notes that I took during the NERCOMP unconference session that I proposed and lead in my previous blog post.  Granted, the notes are a bit disconnected because I was jotting down ideas, notes, and thoughts as they were being mentioned by participants so you may not get a coherent view of everything. My initial thought on a course on Learning Management Systems was that students would get hands-on time with learning management systems (3 different ones, mostly their choice) and that they would have to objectively test these  Learning Management Systems based on a rubric that made sense for their organization (or the organization that they were contracted to work for - if this were a case study). Beyond that the theory aspect seemed a little light, and I didn't just want to create another "hands on" course that could become obsolete in the next five years - this isn't good for the learners. What I came out of the session with is something simi...

A big round of applause for the organizers of the LMS unSIG that took place last Monday. Harvested Tweets and other information from the website (including the notes for the session I moderated ) are on the unSIG website.  This was my first unconference and I have to say that I liked the setup of the unconference.  Most times you go to these workshops and there are topics that you aren't interested in - this one, being crowdsourced, meant that I was able to have a much higher probability of finding that I liked (and I did) and being able to hear from a variety of people rather than a few wise ones that are presenting. That being said, I think that some peripheral structure may have been nice.  I would have liked to have seen representatives from the major learning management systems at this event (Desire2Learn, Canvas, Blackboard, etc.) as a way of getting ideas from end-users.  I know that these companies have their own websites where they get requests from users...

OK, now some of my fellow Apple people, and some of you Android fanbois will scoff at me for going to a Windows Phone 7 development workshop, sponsored by Microsoft, but I'll tell you it was fun!  I think that as much as I like the iOS , Windows Phone 7 , with the MetroUI  seems interesting as platform and with the backing of Nokia I think we'll see it rise up and be viable competition to Android and iPhone (if apps come out that is...) In any case, the workshop was pretty interesting and it gave me an opportunity to mess around with Visual Studio, something I haven't done in three or four years, since I was a student in the MSIT program.  I have to say that  developing for WinPhone7 seems to be quite comparable to designing iPhone apps. From the top level, and from the quite limited exposure I've had to them, the IDEs ( Visual Studio and XCode) seem pretty comparable at this point. The one thing I noticed is that both Microsoft peeps (hey, I actually met Edwin...

Well, the first workshop was today and it was quite interesting.  As I suspected there were quite a few K-12 teachers there interested in getting started with iOS app development so this can trickle down into the high school computer science curriculum; there were some higher education folks there as well. Even though the workshop was all day, you can't really get that deep into app development in eight hours.  Most of the workshop consisted in getting us oriented toward the apple developer accounts and with getting around xcode.  We messed around with interface builder and xcode and learned how to connect the UI elements to the code - but there was little (almost no) coding involved.  Considering I haven't programmed in close to ten years now, this wasn't bad.  Now I just need to get started with the Stanford iTunesU podcasts on iOS development...and perhaps come up with some interesting idea for mLearning (or something m-related) to develop a sample applicat...

Last week a colleague of mine alerted me to some free local workshops for educators.  Initially I saw the first week's workshops and thought that they might be too basic for me, but luckily another co-worker pointed out that Week 2 had some mobile development workshops - I guess the lesson here is to never judge a set of workshops by the first week! In any case, since mobiMOOC was a recent occurrence and since our department has pointed to mobile as something we ought to have now (not five years from now), I thought it would be time well spent.  So Tuesday is a day dedicated to iPhone app development; Wednesday is Windows Phone 7 development and Thursday is Android day. Next week is mobile browser app development.  It's been a number of years (I count close to 10) since I last coded anything but HTML (and possibly SQL) and I honestly didn't think I'd be coding again given the jobs I've had, but I am really looking forward to getting a primer on developing...