Lawrence Lessig has decided not to run for congress. Check his web site for a video explanation.
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Lessig’s Free Culture
Recently I added Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture PDF to my iPod. I’ll talk about the iPod as an e-reader some other time. Today I would like to mention some of the high points in Lessig’s book with was released under a Creative Commons license.
Free Culture starts with some stories from history showing how copyright was evolved from protecting the public from monopolistic publishers hundreds of years ago to protecting certain business models in modern times. There are many specific examples demonstrating how individuals and industries have been affected by copyright law.
I plan to add chapter ten to my required reading for classes that cover copyright. This is the Property chapter and it goes through the entire history of US copyright law. Starting with fourteen years of copyright protection in 1790 for those authors that chose to register works. As it turned out, about 95% of the works produced during this time were never registered, so they were not protected by copyright.
Having the ability to “choose” to protect a work by copyright is something that law now prevents. Today, everything that is written is automatically protected by copyright. This prevents the increase in what Free Culture describes as a normal pool of public domain works that can be freely used to create new works.
The main idea behind Lessig’s book is that we should rethink copyright law now that we have the Internet. If you connect Lessig’s ideas with the need I talked about last summer, we need to cultivate the creativity in our culture.
Lunar Eclipse
It was cold, but we managed to get a nice set of pictures of the lunar eclipse. Click the picture to see the larger version on Flickr.
Tagged science
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On the move
How many first-year teachers have the benefit of being in one room all day? If you are a middle or high school teacher, the odds are you will be using more than one computer every day because you will be moving from room to room.
Here are a few things you can do to make sure you have your technical tools with you wherever you are.
1 – Setup a Protopage
Protopage is a very customizable web page. Access requires only a browser. Every computer I use has the browser configured to go to my Protopage as the start page. Protopage has all the links I use over and over along with my RSS feeds, notes to myself, local weather and just about anything else that deals with using a computer on the Internet. I can use my home desktop and create a new note on my Protopage. When I go to my laptop that note is there too. It is also automatically on my university desktop and my tablet computer because those computers start at my Protopage.
If I run across something interesting and I want to review it later, I copy and paste the link into my “To Be Reviewed” list on my Protopage. As I have time to look at these sites, I remove them from this list. The good ones move to my second tool.
There are other “start page” tools out there: Pageflakes, Netvibes, iGoogle, etc. I have tried them all and Protopage is the most customizable.
2 – del.icio.us
When I run across a site that I know I will reference in the future, I add that site to my del.icio.us links. My links have good descriptions and tags so I can usually find something quickly. Since del.icio.us needs only a browser, I can get to my links from any computer. Note that links to the sites I use multiple times daily (webmail, Blackboard, calendar, etc) are on my Protopage. This is because Protopage permits me to permanently place those links in the top left corner of the page. Links in del.icio.us are sorted in reverse chronological order (last one entered is at the top). That makes those links I use every day a little harder to get to in del.icio.us.
3 – USB Flash Drive
I carry one of these all the time. Actually I have a couple with me most days. If I have files I need throughout the day (Word documents, spreadsheets, PowerPoint files) the USB drive is an easy way to get them from one computer to another computer. This is especially true when getting files from home to work.
I also have Hamachi running on my home and office computers. This creates a VPN between my home computer and my office computer. I can actually get to my home computer’s hard drive while I am at the office. That can be handy, but it is probably more than most people will bother with.
4 – My Blog
I noticed this when I was getting ready for the eTech conference. I have written about so many different topics in my blog, I end up going back and looking at those things when I need a refresher. I talked with John about this a couple of years ago. When I put it in my blog, it is a permanent record that I can easily refer to in the future. This source doesn’t necessarily have to be a blog, but you need somewhere to write your extended thoughts so you can find them later.
GOM Player
For the last few years, I have used a classic media player that I downloaded from freshmeat. Since I switched to Vista last summer, the media player has been quirky. Last week I heard someone mention GOM Player on one of the podcasts I listen to and I decided to give it a try.
To me, there are two important components to a good media player.
1 – it plays everything (audio, video, whatever)
2 – there must be simple keyboard controls (preferably configurable)
There are many players that will handle that first requirement. With a little work, you can even get Windows Media Player to do everything. But the second requirement isn’t always available. For example, if you want to pause the Windows Media Player the keyboard command is Control-P. That’s crazy.
I want it to be the space bar because every media player I have ever used has been that way. Besides, why should I ever need to press two keys (Control-P) to perform a basic function of a media player?
GOM Player plays everything right out of the box. I installed it on a fresh system and it brought all the necessary codecs in automatically. If you don’t like the default keyboard shortcuts (which are good), you can change any or all of them in the preferences menu.
I like this media player so much I have switched all my machines to GOM for both audio and video.