C4T #4

The blog I read for this assignment was Lucacept - intercepting the Web by Jenny Luca. Ms. Luca is the Head of Information Services at a college in Australia.

The first post I read was her School's out Friday post. In this post she talks about how Google Chrome uses Lady Gaga to advertise for them. They use one of her videos as an advertisement. Ms. Luca says that record companies spend millions of dollars on advertisement and still can't reach the amount of people that media networks do. She suggests that people such as Lady Gaga are smart to use social media networks to connect and relate to their fans.

This post also mentions Google's new social network Google+. Ms. Luca likes Google+ and feels that it could be a good tool in education. You can form groups on Google+ and therefore you could have a group of educators. Everyone in this group could have a video conference using only the computer and internet. She says Google+ could be used to create circles for specific groups of students.

I have not yet used Google+, but I do plan to look into it and see if I find it a helpful tool to use in the classroom. I do agree with her opinion about using social media networks as a form of advertisement for fans. I feel you can reach more people using media networks then you can through the television or the radio, or even through magazines.

The second post I read was her post about Creative Commons. Ms. Luca talks about how hard it is to find information on creative commons for a particular piece of information you gather. She has included two videos in this blog post. One which explains Creative Commons and one is an interview with Lawrence Lessig conducted by Derek Wenmoth, the Core Education's Director of eLearning. In his interview Lessig talks about how students and educators should be thinking about usage rights and how Google and Bing do not make it easy to search for Creative Commons.

Both of these videos were very informative. I did not know much about Creative Commons or the importance of understanding them until I watched this video. I do plan to research more on Creative Commons and become more aware of the rights to use material found on the internet.