Bad times for teachers and students stealing images

As a producer of web technologies that provide teachers and learners with online content production tools I often find myself involved in a discussion around the legitimacy to use images found on the internet in students' and teachers' personal projects.

Although teachers over the globe complain that the internet facilitates plagiarism and encourages copying and pasting of text they usually don't show the same criticism when it comes to using/stealing pictures and graphical data.

It is quite common that teachers themselves consider the web as a free online clip art gallery and that they see no harm in using whatever they can find to pimp up their worksheets, slides or website pages without crediting their sources.

No wonder then, that they apply the same logic to images that students can find and copy-paste to decorate their personal printed or online work. Obviously teachers' sensitivity is different depending of the nature of the data that is used or stolen. In school, written text has a much higher status than an image. While copying and pasting graphical data is considered common practice, copying text without quotation marks and indications of the source is considered being a unscrupulous temptation to cheat and to avoid personal effort.

With TinEye by Idée Inc. now comes a search engine based on an image identification technology capable of finding images and variations of images on the internet. TinEye provides authors of visual data with an easy way to detect copies of their creations on websites even if the original version has been cropped, scaled, merged, renamed or colored.

Of course this is not the only application of TinEye but it is one that could have a major effect on schools.

My advice to teachers: Start today with using license free images (for example from Wikimedia Commons) or own creations. Don't make a difference between respecting authors of written text, of sound productions or of images, name your sources and teach your students to do the same.

(Got the hint from Slashdot)

Image source and copyright information :

"This is a faithful photographic reproduction of an original two-dimensional work of art. The original image comprising the work of art itself is in the public domain for the following reason:

This image (or other media file) is in the public domain because its copyright has expired. (...)"

Thinking Tools for Parallelism and Decentralized Systems

Is the ethanol production responsible for the rising corn prices and thus responsible for the rising of food prices or is the subprime crisis the reason for all this, and if, where is the connection? Why are the milk prices dropping in Europe, while simultaneously other food prices are increasing and while China is buying high quantities of milk on the global market - isn't there a contradiction? Is the fuel price increasing because there is shortage of oil resources or is it because of the dropping of the dollar, or is the price part of a strategy to push ethanol production? Or if we all pushed ethanol production would it force crude oil prices to drop?

Even if people tend to think so, the phenomena that can be observed are seldom the fruit of centralized control or clear intentions but of decentralized actions and interactions, parallelism, randomness and self-organization. There is no mono-directional causality, but parallel emergence of multiple situations that act simultaneously and generate effects and patterns that mostly couldn't have been anticipated.

Unfortunately, linear thinking models, coupled with memorization and regurgitation of facts are not the best ways to train people to understand complex emergent phenomena and to find creative solutions to unexpected problems like those that arose recently on a macroeconomic level.

Most of our thinking strategies, school curricula, and tools for learning are all rooted in the paper and pencil area. Even thinking tools like mind-maps which help visualizing the interconnectedness of ideas, aspects, causes and effects in a two dimensional and non-linear way are seldom used in school. And if they were, they are not suited to represent the dynamic of systems.

In order to understand the decentralized nature of social, economical or natural phenomena we need to observe and explore the functioning of decentralized systems and overcome the "centralized mindset" as Mitchel Resnick calls it. This can be achieved through the use of tools like Scratch, StarLogo and StarLogo TNG, which offer a graphical programming environment and which have been developed at the Media Lab under the direction of M. Resnick.

Whereas StarLogo, StarLogo TNG and OpenStarLogo don't seem to be very popular yet, there is a growing community creating and publishing Scratch projects, probably also due to the dedicated website, a Youtube stile sharing portal. Have a look here.

Designing Tools for Evaluation

Back in 2000-2002 during a research project called MIRA Multimedia Interface for Research and Authoring I created a tool for reflective practitioners in school called Multimedia Clipboard. Later on, most of the features of this tool have been integrated into the OLEFA IMS-CMS http://www.olefa.com which offers a powerful web based environment including a database module that can be designed and personalized for multiple uses.

Multimedia Clipboard permitted the collecting and grouping of multiple types of data in order to create layered and multi-perspective descriptions and interpretations of learning situations.
With this kind of tools teachers can evaluate students learning products and processes by creating chunks of information, and include background information of situations and concepts in which these products, processes and their interpretation are embedded.

Once an item is created by importing for example a video clip, the interpretation can be broadened by adding descriptions from different perspectives (comments by students, peers, teachers, parents etc.) and deepened or "thickened" by adding layers of information and interpretation (see the concept of "thick descriptions" by Clifford Geertz and Gilbert Ryle).
This approach is a lot different from a quantitative evaluation, but also from a so called evaluation by competencies in which learning is split up into modules, key stages and key competencies and in which students learning outcomes are, in the end, always compared to normative clusters of knowledge.

The greatest difference however lies in the fact that evaluation by competencies is proclaimed to be formative but neither sets the learner nor the teacher in the focus of an inquiry but the implicit norms.

In opposition to this, a descriptive and interpretive (ethnographic) approach puts the learner and the teacher(s) in the focus because their judgments, ethical considerations and theories become part of the evaluation process. Here, teachers are not observers, but actors in a learning process, and an evaluation is created or co-constructed through collaboration and negotiation. And, students are not objects of evaluation and inquiry but co-evolving subjects. A tool like Multimedia Clipboard is as much a instrument for evaluation as a means to gain insight in the functioning of evaluation and the nature and power of the hidden theories involved - including those which gave birth to the tool itself. Furthermore, and because of the non-linearity of the tool, a small change in the tool has the potential to open a high variety of new possibilities to interconnect information. A small change in a check list of competences - which I consider to be a linear system - will never have such an impact.

By adopting open instruments and ethnographic approaches, evaluation will take the shape of a narrative based on self-organization and reflection instead of a diagnosis conforming to a given structure. We will also reach a high level of unpredictability, variety, redundancy and even messiness, while simultaneously reducing centralized control and normative comparability between individual learning outcomes. On the other hand we will open to all actors involved a space for self-reflection, creativity and double-loop learning.

As there is a growing demand for alternative forms to evaluate students learning, I think that evaluation by normative competencies cannot be but a transitional stage before adopting open tools like Multimedia Clipboard which will extend the possibilities and concepts of so called learning records and portfolios and which will at the same time force teachers in a position of self-reflection.

Free dictionaries

Some online educational portals try to convince teachers and students to subscribe because they offer "for free" commercial resources like online dictionaries and encyclopedias. For free - meaning that the state has spent enormous sums to pay licenses. I can't help but finding this strategy quite odd as there are lots of useful yet really free resources on the net that most Internet literate students know about and use on a daily basis during homework.

Here are some of my favourite online dictionaries which I use:
http://dict.leo.org
http://www.dict.cc/
http://www.lexilogos.com/
http://www.thefreedictionary.com


NetLingo.com - The Internet Dictionary with thousands of terms about the online world of business, technology, and communication, including acronyms, text messaging shorthand, smileys, and more :-)

Wikia

Going live of wikia - the new Wiki search engine. Le's be patient it's just the beginning. Don't expect to find what you are looking for until a collaborative community has been attracted and formed around the wiki farm. I will certainly keep an eye on this project.

At EducDesign we have been working on our own search engine for a while now. As a matter of fact, the idea was born two years ago. It's also only a first version but we think I could be growing rapidly. It's strongly focused on education and it's meant to be fed by people posting interesting sites they have discovered. If you want to have a look, visit the project at www.schoosi.com.