Brianne Rhoades, a student in both my Information Literacy for Teaching and Learning and Teaching with Technology classes (lucky me!) created this continuum to help students see the line at which they should seek permission. Thought it might be helpful for you. I like how she plays with the idea of audience to help determine whether you need to get permission. (CTools is our campus version of Moodle or Blackboard.)

We have also talked in class a lot about the values of showing Creative Commons search engines to students as a hassle-free alternative.

Click on the image above to view it full-size.

Image copyright 2011 Brianne Rhoades; used with permission

photo © 2009 Kat Martin | more info (via: Wylio)

I have a feeling I’m not the only librarian out there who worries that her students aren’t using Creative Commons images in their online work. I’ve seen violations from first grade up to graduate school, even among librarians and library students.

As I’ve mentioned before, Web browsers don’t help much, because when you capture an image from a Web page, the citation doesn’t travel with it.

I know, I know, everybody’s breaking copyright and posting whatever they want wherever they want, but still — it’s nice to do the right thing, isn’t it? (Isn’t it?????)

For some time, I’ve been using and recommending flickrcc.bluemountains.net as a source of high-quality, worry-free Creative Commons images. But even with that source, you’ve got to download and resize an image. Not horrible, but … now there’s something even easier. Wylio lets you do a search among Creative Commons-licensed items, see a preview of the image relative to your text, choose the alignment, and voila — you get an embed code that you can stick right into your blog or Web page, including a citation caption.

Wylio’s a great way to find images easily, use them ethically, and cite them effortlessly. Win-win for everyone.

Take a look at this video (from the Profhacker blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education, quickly becoming one of my favorite blogs for common sense advice on Web tools for teaching and learning) to learn more.

PS - Does anybody find it ironic that when I typed “University of Michigan” into the Wylio search, many of the photos on the original page were of wooden card catalog drawers???? So I used “North Quad,” our department’s new home, as the search term instead and got this pic of our building under construction. However, please don’t ask me how to get from my office to the top floor of that tower. As my office neighbor is fond of saying, this place is built a bit like Hogwarts. I told him that was fine as long as I didn’t need to be in Hufflepuff.

A few of you noticed that our links to Greg Grossmeier’s slides from his September visit to our Teaching with Technology class were no longer working. So here’s an updated link to the page where you can hear his presentation on copyright, Creative Commons, and open access and get the slides, too!

ed504wiki - Copyright presentation via kwout