Digital Literacy for Designers: March 2015

Sunday, March 22, 2015

6 | Memo for the creative output owner

"Art requires imagination. It requires Creativity. Creativity requires experience and experience comes from your life. And your life is expressed in your art."
-Bruce Lee

Creativity is either tangible or intangible. Expression of creativity leads the imagination to go beyond the abstract state. From centuries up to this moment, outputs of creativity are countless in number and derivation, including the original works, the remixed originals, and the other combinations of remixed originals.

I watched Kirby Ferguson’s series documentary titled ‘Everything is a Remix’, and I found the point of view of this filmmaker towards creativity very interesting. I like what he mentions about the basic elements of creativity and several comparisons of film works in his 2nd part serie, the ‘Remix Inc.,’ which he shows the relation among works of creators in all generations . He said that people perceive stories that have been told, retold, transformed, and subverted, and the reason of producing remixed work possibly varies from appreciation of rich resources of the existing materials to budgeting the production (Ferguson).

As a design student and designer, I think the idea of remixing and collaborating on work enhances communication skills as well as allows collaborators to step out of their comfort zones. Because of reference, we learn to create difference based upon the similarity of what we know. However, it is a common ethical belief that those references should be credited. Good examples of remix that I found related to digital literacies are cover songs on Youtube and Wikipedia.

The music and video industries take copyright violations seriously, especially when covers of originals are used commercially. According to Youtube’s website, though they do not mediate copyright ownership disagreements, within their FAQ about derivative work it is clearly written:

You need the copyright owner’s permission to create new works based on their original content. Derivative works may include sequels, translations, spin-offs, adaptations, etc. You’ll probably want to get legal advice from an expert before uploading videos that are based on the characters, storylines, and other elements of copyright-protected material. (Youtube)

(screen shot of removed video on youtube website due to copyright violation.)

Another example is Wikipedia, the editable encyclopedia. I have read information which helps to illuminate issues of copyright that pertain to this aspect of digital literacies and the article titled,'Copyright in a Collaborative Age." Authors Charman and Holloway conduct a survey of copyrights issues in many collaborative outputs, including Wikipedia. They identify an interesting point: “In most cases, Wiki users do not wish to assert copyright and are not interested in financial gain, but when wikis are set up to provide a source of information for reuse, copyright licensing becomes an issue” (Charman and Holloway).

There are millions of people with creative talents around the world, but I believe that there are many who do not realize the importance of protecting ownership rights--both theirs and those whose works may be referenced. Carelessness with or consciously improper use of others’ intellectual property is considered a civil violation, and the penalty for copyright infringement under the United States copyright law ranges from $200-150,000 per work that is infringed.(Remedies for infringement: Damages and profits, 17 U.S.C. § 504)

In order to be prevent legal issues, these intellectual property rights should be taken seriously before publication. At the present, there are many ways to manage one’s property rights. Not only is there the ability to protect creative outputs with copyright, one can limit the usage of copyrighted works with ‘Fair Use’, and legally transfer ownership to the public with ‘Creative Commons’ licenses, which allow the rights to be easily modified from all rights to partial rights reserved.

Works cited:

"Frequently Asked Questions - YouTube Help - Google Help." 2014. 23 Mar. 2015 <https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797449?hl=en>

"Everything is a Remix." 2010. 23 Mar. 2015 <http://everythingisaremix.info/>

"M/C Journal: "Copyright in a Collaborative Age"." 2006. 23 Mar. 2015 <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/02-charmanholloway.php>

"Copyright Infringement and Remedies - US Copyright Office." 2006. 23 Mar. 2015 <http://copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html>

"Copyright Infringement Penalties - Purdue University Libraries." 2009. 23 Mar. 2015 <https://www.lib.purdue.edu/uco/CopyrightBasics/penalties.html>

"A Guide to Copyright and Creative Commons | When I Have ..." 2011. 23 Mar. 2015

Monday, March 16, 2015

5 | Final Project and Online Resource Hunting!

In this digital age, an ability to do online research is a must for college students, especially a design student like me. Even off campus, I feel that people who are really good at online research will get the most recent and more neccessary information than people who lack this skill. News, journal, thesis, archives from libraries and museums, those resources are out there in the cloud, we just have to know the right way to get them. The ability to do smart online research will help us bring out most necessary data by optimizing the right tools. A good article titled "Edupunks’ Guide: How to do research online" is very useful for digital information hunters. There, I found many different sites throughout my research hours and the most helpful research sites for my project are: Google, Google Scholar, Wikipedia, and Prezi. Website which is not listed but I found it second most helful, with great academic research documents and archived articles, was www.academia.edu. In the website, research documents in any area of interest can be put as tags to show up on my homepage after signing up.

My topic started with a broad scope in my head about sustainability and fashion jewelry. Being the most filtered search engine, Google is really useful for exploring my topic because of its randomness of information. I was able to find a broad perspective of information and an overview of some related case studies by googling keywords I saw from the previous search. From scrolling and reading through several sites, I got the final topic that I want to do then I googled new set of keywords again with special symbols to specify my search.

Google Doc is also one of google products that I like in its citation help. Whenever I found article that contain good information for my research, I pasted on the Doc and attached its citation by clicking at ‘Cite’ in the research tool bar, in order to keep all records before I forgot to do it.

I used Google Scholar as a search engine to find supporting materials. Some of the articles I found useful for the business topic of my project. There were a lot of solid supporting details including numeric data diagram, charts, and stats in document as the site mainly contains scholar literatures and journals from academic publisher and universities’ libraries database and peer reviewed articles. Very helpful

Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia which allows collaborative modification or deletion of its content and structure, is a website which I generally use to initially search for definitions. For my final project research, wiki is also used to.did ok job in providing me an overview of costume jewelry history timeline. However, I ensure my information by checking with other resources

Having briefly mentioned above, Academia.edu is basically a social networking website for academics. The platform can be used to share papers, monitor their impact, and follow the research in a particular field. I like this website and feel it is a powerful tool for research and great thing from this site is that the research documents are available to download in pdf format.

Sites I found a little information were Prezi and Youtube (this surprised me). I found a nice presentation about sustainable fashion business model on Prezi, which was quite good one. Youtube is next, Videos that appeared after my keywords were jewelry making, to jewelry product presentation with sustainable concepts, which were not the thing I was searching.

And Sites I found none from keyword I put were Europeana, OpenCulture and ,surprisingly,The Internet Archive (At first I though I would find something here, but no. )

Citation:

"The Edupunks' Guide: How to Do Research Online." 16 Mar. 2015 <http://magazine.good.is/articles/edupunks-guide-excerpt-how-to-do-research-online>

Monday, March 9, 2015

4 | Defining Digital Literacy

Digital literacy’s definition is an ability to practically use digital application to understand visuals and information, to utilize it for discipline application, and to create innovation. The definition of digital literacy in Belshaw’s thesis shares the same idea, but varies in concepts based on contexts that the literacy exists. The context composed of 8 essential elements that will help in developing and recognizing literacy with proper use of digital media.

People from different disciplines may have different purposes when they apply the digital literacy to their approach. I found a few examples that show how people from different professional fields define this terminology.

"That digital literacy is the amount of potential unlocked by the industrial revolution is dwarfed in information terms by what you can do with computers. Digital literacy is about learning to use the most powerful tools we’ve ever built"

Ari Geshner, the senior software engineer at Palantir

First example is digital literacy definition through initiative of The Digital Literacy Project or DLP, founded by Harvard computer-science major students. The project has mission to help communities develop technical literacy with coding and programming. DLP developed their own digital tool for entrepreneurship to increase awareness in crowdsourcing and marketing efforts by using technology, provided new modes of communication for deaf student in Nicaragua, and remote educational program for low-income students in Hong Kong.

Second is the concept of 'eHealth Literacy' by Norman and Skinner's. They mentioned that social media can potentially improve capacity to obtain, process, and understand health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions.”(US Department of Health and Human Services, 2000) In my opinion, social media is a great ways for physicians to stay connected with patients, such as www.breastcanceranswer.com. the website is operated by physicians to exchange information with the patients. Twitter can be a very helpful medium to connect among physicians as their educational resources because post on twitter can be linked to blog with active discussion.

May last example is Globaloria Learning Platform has a very cool approach that they teach students and young adults to develop “STEM” learning while developing digital literacy, science, technology, engineering, and math and global citizenship skills through game design. I like the idea of game designing with a goal of civic engagement literacy because this will help people learn to make game for just fun, but also stimulate them to navigate digital network from there.

In conclusion, I see that digital literacy has been applied to a lot professional fields, from computer, science, medical, architecture, to design. Not only because it is a trend to learn about coding, but I also think that it is an educational essential that people should learn to elevate literacy and skills and optimize their capacity with use of digital tools.