Troy Patterson

Educator, Thinker, Consultant

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CC-BY-NC-SA along with the symbol for each of these.

Attribution

January 6, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I recently read a wonderful post by Alan Levine – Cogdog on a picture that he had shared that ended up being used in an advertisement. I share almost all of my photos with the CC-BY-NC-SA license.


This breaks down to this:

  • BY: credit must be given to the creator
  • NC: Only noncommercial uses of the work are permitted
  • SA: Adaptations must be shared under the same terms

Alan Levine talks about a write up where he shared his images as CC-0 (Public Domain Dedication: essentially making them free for anyone to use in any way). One of his favorite pictures of him and Cori ended up being used in an Instagram advertisement for OMGYES (which is focused on intimacy and pleasure).

He reached out to the company and received a reply from a real person. That person, Rob, sent along an apologetic email. He had the image removed from all ads. Here’s the thing, Rob didn’t have to do that. Alan had shared the image in a way that legally allowed Rob to use the image. (Rob also added a note about Alan’s photography being “stunning”). So there are good people out there. Alan has since changed the licensing of the photo to CC BY-NC-SA.

Since I’m participating in 52Frames this year, I got to thinking about licensing. Specifically, what is NC (noncommerical)? So I did a bit more digging. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a detailed explanation on Creative Commons. Specifically, does an ad count as “commercial”? (To me, it’s obviously a “Yes”, but I’ve been around enough to know that sometimes the law is different than my logic.). After a bit more research, it seems that NC is pretty broad and covers anything that “incorporates a financial transaction”. The Smithsonian has a nice explanation:

Non-commercial use encompasses a wide range of exciting possibilities—including artistic, educational, scholarly, and personal projects that will not be marketed, promoted, or sold. Examples include, but are not limited to, presentations, research, tattoos, sixth-grade science fair projects, tablet backgrounds, free and ad-free apps, GIFs, holiday centerpieces, Halloween costumes, decoupage, inspiration boards, and shower curtains.

Commercial use is any reproduction or purpose that is marketed, promoted, or sold and incorporates a financial transaction. Examples include, but are not limited to, merchandise, books for sale (including textbooks), apps that will be sold or have advertising, periodicals and journals with paid subscriptions, TV programs and commercial films, advertisements, websites that sell images, and cause-related marketing.

So, it seems that choosing the CC-BY-NC-SA license is generally going to be right for me. On some of the photos that I submit, I may keep an All Rights Reserved on, but I’m guessing that will be pretty few.

52 Frames

52 Frames

January 5, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I’ve joined the 52 Frames Photo Challenge. The idea is to take a photo a week that fits the challenge. The first week is a selfie. So, I have my assignment for tonight (since this is a weekly challenge, the first submission is due by January 7th).

I’ll link to my submissions each week as well. I’ll have to see if I can commit and keep up with the submissions.

I am looking forward to the challenges though. I enjoy photography and want to get better at it.

Reader’s Theater

January 4, 2024 / / 0 Comments

The wonderful Shawn McGirr sent along the Reader’s Theater activity he created. The activity has students picking a short story and presenting that story to the class.

Students select their script. All students get a question/discussion page after the performances are done. During rehearsals, students in each skit group design questions in the StudentQuiz activity that restricted to their group until the end and students answer student created questions.
Final exam is a pool of all the questions with a random number from each StudentQuiz activity pulled for the final test.

This is a phenomenal activity. The students get to lead the way. They are creating the questions.

Shawn sent along an example of the activity. However, when I imported the activity and tried to use it, I hit an error screen. Shawn utilized StudentQuiz in Moodle. StudentQuiz is a great plug-in that I’ve used before.

Hm. I thought maybe it was due to the original being created from an older version. So, I tried to create a brand-spanking new activity. Drats, same error message. Or maybe not drats. The issue probably isn’t related to the imported activity. So, off to the forums. It is there that I discovered that there is a known issue with StudentQuiz and Moodle version 4.3. The fix is in the pipeline. Hopefully, by mid-January, it will be available.

I do have another Moodle installation though. That one is running Moodle version 4.1 currently. I was able to import the activity there without issue.

The activity is awesome. Shawn has done a great job. The students take the lead. They get to select a piece to be the expert on. The students get to create the questions. The students get to answer the questions created by their peers. The teacher then gets to utilize those student-created questions to create a unique “final exam” for each student. (The teacher can approve the student-created questions. Then, the teacher essentially says, “give each student 20 questions from this bank of 100”.)

Holidays

January 1, 2024 / / 0 Comments

It’s back to work time as Holiday break is now over. I got to relax and spend a good bit of time with the family. It was great to see the kids. We got the youngest moved to her new apartment. This is the best apartment she’s had in a while. She actually has plenty of space. She has an upper floor, technically two bedrooms, but one is being used as a dining room.

I rented a trailer for the move. I also took some dressers, a futon, and our old kitchen table to the youngest. She now has things that at least go together.

Spent today (January 1st) doing some cleaning and a bit of reading. Also went to the my eldest daughter’s house to watch a bit of Fry and Laurie. I also spent a bit of time upgrading darktable. I updated to version 4.6.0. Everything seemed fine until I went to import some new pictures. Darktable would then hang upon rejecting the request to access other programs. Apparently, this just took a really long time to set. Upon leaving it run for a while (OK, I admit it, I was working on posting a bug report), the import menu showed up and all is right with the world (or at least darktable). I do have pictures on an external hard drive and probably should switch to a faster drive.

I saw that John Gruber posted Merry about being the luckiest person in the world. I hate to break it to him, but I think that I’ll challenge that one. 😉 (He actually ends with “I hope you are too”, so really, I tip a pint to him and say, “Yes, Yes, I am too”).

Couch

January 1, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I used to live in an area where cars were frequently up on “blocks”. Rarely did I see a couch up on blocks. Not sure if this is a step up or not.

A porch with a variety of signs with pithy saying and some concert posters. In front of the porch is a leather couch up on cinder blocks.

MoodleNet Thoughts

December 28, 2023 / / 0 Comments

I posted on Mastodon about the lack of feedback on Moodle Net. Martin replied asking for feedback. I’ve responded, but I thought that I would flesh out my thoughts a bit here.

I love Moodle and what you can do with it. I love that there isn’t a big money-making, data-sucking, privacy-invasive company running it.

A little background. I’m in the US. Specifically, I’m in K-12 education teaching and learning. Moodle is not super popular. There are certainly a few places, but Moodle is much bigger at the University level than K-12. There is much angst over Moodle. Quite simply, teachers find it “too hard”.

There are reasons that Google Classroom has taken over. It really doesn’t do much (thus, much less to learn for teachers). Google Classroom is essentially handing out worksheets and getting them back (another bonus, teachers understand the worksheet process).

When COVID hit, there was a rush for two things, video conferencing and an LMS. Zoom quickly captured the video conferencing mindshare. So much so, that even now it is pretty much the only game in town. Google Classroom captured the LMS market (note that it not an LMS but that doesn’t matter). It doesn’t even matter that it is not an LMS. The District that I was in at the time evaluated Canvas, Schoology, and Moodle (we had Moodle installed and were known internationally for our work in Moodle – due to Chris Kenniburg). The District chose to go with Schoology. It was “easier”.

MoodleNet

So this is one reason I was (still am) hopeful for MoodleNet. MoodleNet should be a great way to share resources, activities, etc. This means teachers wouldn’t have to create all their own material. This alone would make Moodle “easier”. Teachers could get started.

However, I do not find MoodleNet engaging. I’ve posted some things there, but I don’t get any feedback. There is currently no way to provide feedback. I can’t tell someone that I liked their materials or that I used it with changes. Hence. I reached out to Martin.

I don’t think that this needs to be overly complicated. I thought about ratings, 1-5 stars, adding how it was used, tags, and more. Really though, I think a simple comment box would be the way to go. Let users decide how to use it. Let users make comments. Provide a link back to the profile of the user, what date the comment was made, but otherwise, just free-form comments.

I am hopeful that that would provide a bit of social connections. It would provide the opportunity to provide feedback. It may encourage more people to submit resources.

cartoon books of various sizes.

Ownership, Anti-Ownership, and Deleting “Your” Stuff

December 21, 2023 / / 0 Comments

…or why you “bought” it, but don’t own it.

In the “good old days”, one went to a bookstore and bought a physical copy of the book (this also applied to movies). Once one had read the book, one was free to give that to a friend. Or, you put it on your bookshelf. Or donate it to a library. You also have/had the legal right to sell the book (in order to get money to buy more books – 🙂 ). The ability to sell the book is known as First Sale Doctrine.

In the digital age, that has all changed. Legally, when you “buy” a book (again, same for movies) through an online site, you are really just acquiring permission to access it. That permission to access the “book” (or movie) will have limitations. These resources are for your “personal, non-commercial” use only (i.e. you can’t share it, or in the case of movies, show it to a group).

The landscape has changed, but the expectations of many people haven’t. Yet, this is important to note.

There are a couple of recent posts that highlight this.

The Anti-Ownership Ebook Economy

This is a lengthy read that has lots of great information. The article points out that not only do you not have the right to sell the book that you “bought”, but that your behavior can also be tracked while you are reading that book.

The article points out the additional attacks on public libraries as well. Specifically, publishers are fighting online lending.

PlayStation is erasing 1,318 seasons of Discovery shows from customer libraries

This is a pretty easy to understand write up. People bought movies through Playstation. Those that did so will lose access to them. Here is the notification:

As of 31 December 2023, due to our content licensing arrangements with content providers, you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased Discovery content and the content will be removed from your video library.
We sincerely thank you for your continued support.

Discovery would like people to subscribe to MAX or Discovery+.

Between the two articles, it is very clear that the rights to media have changed. If you don’t like this and would like to see different rules, reach out to your Congressperson.

Bright Moon through trees. The moon is bright behind a cloud. A couple of trees, barren of leaves are in the foreground.

Week Note 2023-12

December 12, 2023 / / 0 Comments

Blog Photos

I usually use Labnol as a great way to leverage Google Photos as a blog post image. However, occasionally, the service just doesn’t work. It’s a free service, so there is no real concern. This was the case with the last blog post.

I try to watch the space that I use with WordPress (a habit developed long ago). I also post several of my pictures to be freely shared (usually CC-SA-NC-BY). I had a picture that I wanted to use as the featured image, so I shared that image on Unsplash.

I also shared the image on PixelFed. PixelFed is a free, no-advertising site for sharing pictures. There are lots of great pictures shared on the site.

So, I have at least a few ways to share images. There are lots of wonderful images out there that can be used. (Please remember to attribute images and thank those who post.)

Dinner with the Family

I had a great dinner with the whole family. It is so wonderful to sit down and eat with my wife and kids.

Clocks

I’ve dropped off a couple of clocks for repair. One is actually a timer. The other is a clock with sentimental value.

The clock repair person was wonderfully typical Mainer. She is passionate about clock repair, and a wonderful person. We had a nice chat about the clocks and life in general.

Target

My wife and I headed out to Target for a bit of shopping. I was pretty gobsmacked by the number of empty shelves. This was on general stuff too.

Dog Showers

Hazel got the “zoomies” and with the rain, her backyard is pretty muddy. Thus, Hazel received a record three baths.

Christmas Lights

I put up Christmas lights right after Thanksgiving. I was thinking that maybe that was a little bit early. Then the temperature hit a high of 12 degrees on the next day that I would’ve been putting up lights. So, yeah, not too early.

Email

My favorite email that I received this week started like this:

“I apologize for the delay in my response as our team has been understaffed, and my time and focus has been limited to the most urgent tasks.”

Subtext, your email wasn’t that important.

Picture of a wooden fence. In the foreground are two small trees covered with snow. In the background are many trees covered with snow. Snow covers all the ground as well.

Week Note 2023-11

December 4, 2023 / / 0 Comments

Snowy Morning

Well, we had our first real snow this morning. That meant a little bit of shoveling this morning. It was really beautiful though.

The drive to work was incredibly beautiful.

However, the power also went out (later found out it was tree-related). Not only the power, but the cable went out as well.

Christmas Decorations

We got the tree up and decorated this weekend. The first task ended up un “pre-lighting” the artificial tree as the lights that are (uh, were) tightly wrapped around the branches failed to actually light up.

Cookies

Rm and D1 had a cookie-making session. Much fun and many good cookies were baked.

A1

We ended up going out to lunch at A1 on Saturday. This meant there was no need for dinner that night (save for a bit of cheese and crackers while decorating).

Flu Shots

I had a nice long call with our insurance as I was trying to get a flu shot. It turns out that our insurance covers Flu shots. However, they cover Flu shots through medical insurance. Most common places to get Flu Shots bill through prescriptions. So, I’ve made an appointment, but it will be a while before I can get my Flu shot.

Clocks

We have a couple of clocks that need to be fixed. I had tried to fix one, but it proved beyond my capabilities. Finally, we have found a clock repair shop. I’ll be taking the clocks this week to get repaired.

Thanks

I take inspiration from Doug Belshaw, whom I’ve met but I’m sure wouldn’t remember me, and Alan Levine for their blogging, sharing, and presence. I appreciate their work and sharing so very much.

Pixel Fed Feed

I’ve finally been able to subscribe through Mastodon to my PixelFed feed. It’s little things like this that end up bringing joy. It also points to the power of open-source and Activity Pub.

Weekly Update 2023-10

November 30, 2023 / / 0 Comments

CMTC23

I’m attending (and presenting at) Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference.

Presentation

My presentation was on H5P & Me (you can see it with the link).

I like where the presentation is at this point. I’ve presented this a few times with lots of changes. It is now at a point where there is enough flexibility with solid content.

AI

Well, if there was any question at all, AI is THE topic in education. I really should’ve presented on AI at this conference.

So, naturally, I attended a session on AI. It was fine. Nothing earth-shattering, but some good perspectives.

Of course, this is why AI sessions are so popular. There is more that we don’t know than we do. At least we think so. We’re really

Thanksgiving

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving. The offspring were both in the house. We had a great time.

Holiday Season

The Holiday season has kind of officially begun. That is, I decided to put up the outside lights before a full frost, frozen ground situation.

Search Creative Commons

Thanks to the wonderful Alan Levine (@cogdog), I can now type gcc in my URL bar (then hit the tab key) in Chrome to invoke a search of CC licensed images.

You can too.

https://cogdogblog.com/2021/12/forcing-google-image-search-cc/

(Please head over to Alan Levine’s site to read his write up. For me, I’m posting the actual search engine code needed.)

https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&tbm=isch&tbs=il%3Acl

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