Thing 23: Creative Commons

This Thing should be way earlier in the list of Things we do for this course. We learned of Creative Commons some time ago, and I now religiously use it to locate photos for my school projects, so that I know I'm "safe." What I mean by safe is that I am not wrongly taking someone else's work off the internet. I am taking work that someone has granted others permission to use.

Dr. Wall asked that we locate something on her blog of 23 things that was good use of Creative Commons. I hadn't realized at the time of doing Thing 21 (Animoto = Animazing; yes, I've renamed it), but sure enough she had borrowed that entire exercise from a different website. At the very bottom of the exercise she said this:

 (originally posted on Explore...Discover...Play: Learning 2.1 and used here under a Creative Commons license)

I was able to click on the link to find the original assignment. She gave credit where credit was due, and did the right thing, as we've been learning in this course. Creative Commons is easily accessible, as I've learned here in this course, on both Flikr.com and basic Google Image Search. Sadly, I was unaware of it before this course. I knew of copyright laws, obviously, but this is an area that should be taught to us college folk as freshmen. It's never too late, however, and I will know for the rest of my college career (and real life that follows) how to legally use others' work without worry of breaking any laws.