Day: July 21, 2009

I had a look at the Terms of Service for Flickr (Yahoo), Facebook, World of Warcraft (Blizzard) and Delicious.  The question of ownership is one that requires a little more explanation. For Flickr and Facebook, anything that I create, I own, however if I upload it I grant a royalty free license to use that content to the website owner. It gives them the license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform, and publicly display the Content. For WOW, they own the content and the user is licensed to use it, and for Delicious the only real content is tags and URL’s so it really doesn’t apply. Having programmers in the family, I was pretty well aware of general terms of service, but I was most surprised by WOW. There are some very specific do’s and don’ts and a complete Code of Conduct which I found very interesting.  The other big surprise was from Facebook, and the stipulation that you may not use facebook from a country which is embargoed from the U.S.

I do use Flickr and Delicious with students, but carefully and not in public areas, I find them very useful tools.

Here is a link to a little tool that keeps track of changes in Terms of Service for websites. I thought it was interesting.

http://www.tosback.org/timeline.php

Since I had a fair amount of previous experience with using iMovie to create video, I decided to try screen capture for my LMS site to add some instructional material.  It turned out to be an all day activity!  I used two different tools to try them out, the first was Screentoaster a completely web based tool that comes with a free trial period.  It worked well and was easy to use, but the file upload took almost an hour, and then I lost the original .mov file in the process of the upload (somehow?) so I couldn’t add titles or anything else to the screencast.  Because the save and upload took so long, I decided to go and look for another tool, this time I chose Jing which is also free, but requries a downloaded program on your computer.  Jing was also very easy to use, but only allows file save in a .swf  format which is not supported by iMovie either, so I am still without a title page.  I imagine that if I dug around enough I could either find another tool, or a converter of some kind, but I’m drawing the line at 8 hours on one 2 minute movie.  Here is a link to the first video on [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGeZn44HbdU[/youtube], and the second one usingaudacity.