Working for a Living (part two)
This is the second part of a two-part blog. The first part looked at some of the more straightforward ways of making money online such as sales, fee-for-service, subscription and brokerage.
This is the second part of a two-part blog. The first part looked at some of the more straightforward ways of making money online such as sales, fee-for-service, subscription and brokerage.
With all the recent attention focused on stories of teenagers charged with distributing child pornography for taking sexually suggestive pictures of themselves, jobs lost due to Facebook and MySpace entries, and libel suits over blog posts, people are justifiably concerned about the permanence of material posted to the Internet. Many a teacher or parent has had to carefully explain to children or teens that whatever they post online might be seen by people other than the intended audience, and might be out there for a very long time.
The issue of copyright is one that many of us probably know a little bit about. Copying is stealing – and stealing is bad - but it can still be a grey area in a social media world which is very PRO sharing.
The YouTube video “Ultimate Dog Tease” has jumped from 15 million to 37 million views since the beginning of May 2011. The “JK Wedding Entrance Dance” has hit 67 million views since it was launched on YouTube. These two videos have more followers than some TV shows. They're fun, they're silly and, like YouTube as a medium, they are worth celebrating.
One of the most noted aspects of the Internet is its anonymity: by and large, people online will treat you as whoever you say you are. In the West, this is often used for mischief or identity play, but in other parts of the world anonymity can have a much more significant and liberating effect.
The classic 1985 science fiction novel Ender's Game is one of several books of that period that foresaw both the advent of the Internet and its eventual importance in society. While certain aspects of its portrayal seem dated – in particular, it more resembles the text-based bulletin board systems of the time than today's graphic Web – one element stands out as being particularly prescient: the use of the Internet to allow youth to participate fully in society. While today's young people aren't using the Internet to take over the world, as the characters in the novel do, they are increasingly using it to change the world, and more and more teachers are using the Internet to bring civic engagement into the classroom.
With the recent spate of marine piracy off the coast of Somalia, culminating in the abduction and rescue of Captain Richard Phillips, it’s a bit disorienting to see the word “piracy” used to refer to, well, pirates. That’s because for the last few decades the word has been much more often applied to those who “pirate” intellectual property such as software, music, and videos. In fact, the use of the word in that context has a surprisingly long history: Daniel Defoe, in 1703, used the term to describe printers who made unauthorized copies of his work.
This is the first in a series of blogs looking at the history and future of Web 2.0. From Facebook pages to viral Barack Obama speeches, the latest boom to hit the media is the rise of user-created content. Services such as Facebook and YouTube have created a new business model: rather than selling content to consumers, as media companies traditionally have done.
PBS' Frontline will be showing Growing Up Online on Tuesday, January 22.
Two new media education resources crossed our desk recently: Totally Wired by Anastasia Goodstein and Children's Learning in a Digital World, edited by Teena Willoughby and Eileen Wood. While they are extremely different, both are useful additions to any media education library.