Listened: OEG Voices 040: Charlie Farley and Lorna Campbell on Two Award Winning Projects from University of Edinburgh – OEG Voices a podcast produced by Open Education Global.

I huffduffed 1 this mainly to hear the voices of Alan & Lorna.

A few years ago I really hoped that the OER idea would catch on with primary & secondary teachers. Ian and I discussed this many times while working on Glow. We went to a few OER and Wikimedia events but we never got the traction to make it work.

Sharing resources for primary & secondary schools seems a very mixed bag of Facebook (I am lead to believe), the web, TES, twitter and Google Drive. The understanding of OER and creative commons amongst my colleagues is not evenly distributed yet. This is not a criticism, my knowledges of many areas I should know about is quite shaky.

I really enjoyed the listen, the work Edinburgh is doing is inspiring on all sorts of levels. I learned this included my own:

In this episode’s conversation, OER Adviser Charlie Farley shares a fabulous outreach program started in GeoSciences that has expanded to other disciplines, where students get applied open education experience working with local schools, museums, and community groups, to design and publish OERs that are shared openly through TES Resources and Open.Ed.

This has taken me to University of Edinburgh Open.Ed – Teaching Resources – Primary Science which looks as if it is full of a lot of useful resources for me and my school colleagues.

The ones I’ve downloaded so far are well badged with Open Education Resource and Creative Commons licenses. They also look like great resources.

I am fairly embarrassed not to have known about this, but quite excited I do now. I’d recommend a listen for inspiration & following the links for useful resources.

  1. Huffduffer is a wonderful service that allows you to gather audio from across the web into your own personal RSS feed. You can then subscribe to that in the app you listen to podcasts on. It also will rip youtube videos to audio and add them via huffduff-video
Bookmarked The Commons of Images (WordPress News)
In this episode, Josepha is joined by the co-founder and project lead of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg. Tune in to hear Matt and Josepha discuss the relaunch of CC Search (Openverse) in WordPress and t…

Openverse sounds like a great idea, a built in Creative Commons search to the WordPress media library would be great for Glow Blogs.

Replied to David Gilmour on Twitter (Twitter)
“Education in Times of Crisis and Beyond: Maximizing Copyright Flexibilities - https://t.co/nia86x1tS3 @johnjohnston @TheoKL”

Open education is not a short-term fix to a passing problem—it is a long-term solution to ensuring equitable, inclusive access to effective educational resources and learning opportunities.

In the same way open science is better science (the world is sharing COVID-19 research to create a vaccine), open education is better education.

So good, thanks David. Also, IMO, as much as possible should be accessible by the simplest tech.

Not because my photos are in anyway professional, but because of the wonderful things Flickr does. Flickr allows me to store and organise my photos. I can look at pictures by friends, acquaintances and all sorts of groups.

Most importantly Flickr curates and organises creative commons licensed and public domain photos. These are searchable and Flickr give access to them via an API that is useful and usable by non-professionals. I’ve had an amazing amount of fun and use (professionally as a teacher). To me Flickr is an important part of the web, I have a pro account to support that.

If you use Flickr and don’t have a pro account you can get 25% off with the code 25in2019 or use this link.

Big Flickr Announcement: All CC-licensed images will be protected – Creative Commons

I’m happy to share Flickr’s announcement today that all CC-licensed and public domain images on the platform will be protected and exempted from upload limits. This includes images uploaded in the past, as well as those yet to be shared. In effect, this means that CC-licensed images and public domain works will always be free on Flickr for any users to upload and share.

Via @clhendricksbc

This is really great news. From a selfish point of view it means my Flickr Stampr will still make it easy for my class to attribute images in their school work.

From a wider perspective the Creative Commons post above expands on both the benefits and costs of Flickr taking this step. As explained the cost for this huge archive of photos will have to be covered by the pro accounts and Flickr’s income. Personally I am delighted to pay for this. I am not a pro photographer but I get a lot of goodness from Flickr. The least of these is probably the storage of my photos. Access to a goldmine of Creative Commons images and an API that is not to complicated for an amateur to play with are the major benefits for me.

This model of providing a free service is hopefully a much better than the free services that lead to shut down that we see so often.

Featured image a screenshot of Random Flickr Blendr using:
Puy Mary, Cantal, France | Pom’ | Flickr (CC_BY license) and
Vergului | youtu.be/rTnXnib2iEA George Enescu – Romanian Poe… | Flickr (attribution license)

Why we’re changing Flickr free accounts | Flickr Blog

Beginning January 8, 2019, Free accounts will be limited to 1,000 photos and videos. If you need unlimited storage, you’ll need to upgrade to Flickr Pro.

I got my mail from Flickr today explaining the changes. I’ve a pro account so it will not affect my photos at all.

I’ll be more interested in how it affects search. I often use Flickr photos to illustrate blog post, presentations and in my classroom.

I also encourage my pupils to use cc licensed images. It is hard for 8-11 year olds to attribute but the flick API allows me to help them with FlickrCC Stampr.

I wonder if the search will be less useful. There was some chat about keeping CC Images. I do hope so.

Update thanks to ronguest and jemostrom in the comments:

Photos that were Creative Commons licensed before our announcement are also safe. We won’t be deleting anything that was uploaded with a CC license before November 1, 2018. Even if you had more than 1,000 photos or videos with a CC license. However, if you do have more than 1,000 photos or videos uploaded, you’ll be unable to upload additional photos after January 8, 2019, unless you upgrade to a Pro account.

from: The Commons: The Past Is 100% Part of Our Future | Flickr Blog

That sound better:-)

Featured image for this post: flickr Scrabble by Dirk Dittmar used under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 license. Stamped with the tool mentioned above.