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Week 5 Reflection

 This week brought with it a lot of fun and useful tools and concepts. I have used Flickr (I participated in the Flickr challenge and am considering making some more photo essays out of my trip to Bonaroo this week) and I pretty regularly use Goodreads- when I'm not in a reading slump. 

I was also very interested in the content curation resources. I usually help the students at my school with both history and science fair. We generally use Office365 to keep a running document of shared resources, but a site like Pocket would be incredibly helpful to the kiddos as they would be able to keep all of their resources in one place. Middle schoolers are notoriously bad at keeping track of literally anything, so having an easy to access and simple user interface will make all of our lives easier. 

This week also made me think a lot about Intellectual Property Law. The educator in me wants information to be accessible to the general masses- information is power and power belongs to the people. However, as a creator, I also grapple with having mine and other's work protected from plagiarism and stealing, especially in an age where large corporations are using AI to rip off local artists and creators. So, where do we draw the line? How do we protect our work and get paid for it while also making the web wild and free like it was in the beginning? 

I am hoping to figure it out soon. 


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