Taking and Sharing Fotos

This post satisfies the assignment for the sixth week of the course on creating online educational resources given at Wikiversity. Participants were asked to study photo editing literature and software, review web sites for sharing photos under open licenses, shoot local photos, upload same to flickr and at least 1 image to Wikimedia Commons or LeMill  and write a blog post about all of the foregoing. 

I found so many image web sites I was both overwhelmed and intimidated. I will post my foto study at some point next week. My attention was arrested from one site to the next. And each proclaimed itself to be the greatest online community of images, or something to that effect. For example, here is the Tree of Life Web Project. One could and I did browse there for hours. Learning materials, including images [about biodiversity and the evolutionary history of organisms] are provided on special pages, called treehouses, which are attached to the branches and leaves of the Tree of Life. Treehouses are authored by Treehouse Builders, who may be scientists, teachers, learners, or science enthusiasts. This is a collaborative project featuring materials provided by hundreds of contributors, thus the Tree of Life project staff cannot grant permission for the use of materials displayed on branch pages, leaf pages, articles, notes, or treehouses, but they do have an exception for fair use for educational multimedia.    

Then I found Registered Commons, an endeavor that Lawrence Lessig believes is a step in the right direction. The RC provides a permanent link to the work, its license and a digital timestamp. It does not matter the type of media - photography, poetry, a series of blog entries or an open source software project; thus everyone can now have access to evidence of the author’s permission for re-using the author’s work.