Best Practices in Fair Use

American University's School of Communications Center for Social Media has made available the full report of The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education as a PDF download. It is meant to help educators using media literacy concepts and techniques to interpret the copyright doctrine of fair use. This code of best practices was created by convening ten meetings with more than 150 members of leading educational associations, including signatories to this document, and other educators across the United States.

This video has some interesting commentary on copyright law and the rapidly changing technological landscape and what it potentially means to teaching media literacy.

Readability Test

TV Reviews

That blog readability test has cropped up again in many of the blogs I follow. Being as curious as the next person, I decided I would plug in my blog address and see how my blog fared as far as readability goes.


I'm not sure if the result is a compliment or an insult as far as my writing goes. If it's a compliment, all the credit goes to Jim Klein, the best high school writing and composition teacher ever. He's even excused for being totally a Green Bay Packers fan in Detroit Lion territory.

Hello Again

It's been several months since I've seen this logo come up on Twitter, their Fail Whale, meaning they are over capacity.

Things had been percolating along quite nicely with no problems for quite some time, but my reading has indicated that tweeting is the new "In" thing, replacing blogging for many. They say blogging has lost the unique, immediate and intimate feel it began with in the early days and that Twitter is being adopted as it seems to have that same unique quality.

I'll have to wait a bit to stop following one app as it is throwing out too many tweets that do nothing for me. Kind of an annoyance, but hopefully I can log on soon to slow down those tweets.

An Impulse Purchase

It gets dark so early these days that we'd been talking about getting some solar lights to light the walk in the yard. My husband was looking at utilitarian lights or lanterns. I saw these "Christmasy" ones at Sam's Club and liked the more decorative look, not to mention they are LED, change colors, and can charge even on cloudy days. Perfect for NE Minnesota where we need all the cheerful light we can get in winter months.

Life Lessons

Mashable's 2nd Open Web Awards

I was so impressed with the Lifesnapz application, both idea and implementation, that I nominated them in the photosharing category of Mashable's 2nd Open Web Awards which runs from November 5- November 16, 2008.

Have you checked out their application? If you have and liked it, feel free to use this widget and submit a vote for them. I want them to be around for a long time.

See my post for my take on their wonderful photo, family,history, sharing application. The hardest part in nominating them was to decide which category to do it in.

Google's Take on Election Day

Those clever folk at Google have a way of recognizing special days by tinkering with their logo.

I love their Election Day version which popped up on me quite suddenly while doing some verification searches for interlibrary loan items.