I have done some research on the concepts of Copyright and Creative Commons. I had always known what Copyrighted work was: work registered with the government that gives the creator rights to copy, to receive credit/profits from use or display of his/her work for a time period.

Creative Commons though, I have never heard of until this course. It is an amazing concept though! It is a free copyright license, that is much less restrictive than Copyrighting your works. It allows the creator to customize their own restrictions on there works. This makes it not as restrictive, and allows people to use and even ‘tweek’ your work (if you want to) for educational purposes. It is based on the idea that creativity spawns creativity. By sharing my work freely (or semi-freely lol) with people from around the world, a creative learning community is promoted.

I used a few sites to find out about Creative Commons (yes including wikipedia), but the one I found to be most informative and helpful was http://creativecommons.org/ .

It explained the concept of creative commons, allows you to find creative works, and helps you pick out a license to your liking! Here is mine…

This work by Mohamed T. Moaz is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

My Creative Commons license allows others to use and share my work, but for non commercial use only, they must credit me, and cannot alter my work at all.

Dear Parents,

I honestly don’t  know what happened to me this week. I was definitely falling behind in work and the week just has been INSANE. The counselors here at camp are wonderful and they continue to teach us how to tell stories through visual creations, such as photography.

It has been a lot of fun exploring different aspects of photography and learning to make interesting images. However the course work is getting heavy and I haven’t been physically capable to catch up. I continued being sick this week, and that was not fun for me.

As I previously told you we have to complete “Daily Creates” of different things. There are daily assignments that needs to be completed and we chose five out of the seven to do. Mom and dad you already know that I love photography. Therefore I first focused on taking pictures of something that isn’t in focus or apart if it is blurr. I used my Canon t1i Rebel to capture the image then used Aperture to blurr some part of the image.

Then I took a photograph of six minutes past the hour. You know that we are a tea loving family and therefore I took a picture of a tea cup that has a picture of a clock six past the hour.

Thirdly, I created a monochrome photograph, this is my favorite feature while edited photographs. Monochrome gives certain images this element that makes you tell stories, even with the simplest of pictures. I again used Aperture, to conduct this feature.

and fourth create was to capture an image of something metaphorical or physical that I envy. My childhood is something that I truly miss. I still consider myself a big kid at heart (and mind) but I also miss the innocence that dies off as we grow into these heartless human beings. Being a child is a beautiful thing, and let’s be honest, I was a darn cute little girl. I took a picture of my friend on a swing at night, under the moonlight. This photograph explained my childhood pretty well.

Finally, I explored mine craft, a virtual world that I am able to connect with other campers while building myself a fortress to keep out the monsters, umm yes. Monsters come out at night to kill you, so I downloaded this game and I will eventually defeat these darn monsters. Maybe this is not a good idea after all. But I will let you know how it goes.

Also I forgot to tell you that our camp counselors showed us how to correctly use plug ins for our blogs. I learned how to install them. I installed twitter, recent comments and other plug ins to make my site appear awesome (hope it worked).

Alright, that is all for now.
I hope you are doing well.

Your favorite daughter,
Abir

This American Life: Reruns

I enjoyed listening to this episode of This American Life with the overall topic of reruns. It caught my attention because I love reruns. I watch my favorite shows hundreds of times and I read my favorite books until there are creases in the spine. In the prologue, as well as  throughout the entire radio show, you get a better understanding of what Ira Glass meant when he talked about “good taste” and being ruthless. The message of the show was clear and the show was fun to listen to because the important details were what stood out.

In Act One, all the topics that Ira Glass talked about on youtube were perfectly exemplified. There were the building blocks: the anecdote and the reflection. The anecdote being the actions of the movie, while the reflection is the interview with Trent Harris. It had the element of finding a great story, both in Starlee Kine finding the story of Trent Harris and in Trent Harris finding Beaver. Trent had good taste in making this movie over and over again. He never put in anything that would take away from the movie and always kept the important details in the movie. Also, the element of personal interaction was evident in Act One. Many connections were made through just one basic story and through those interactions you can internalize that story and see the real drama of the story come out.

The entirety of Act Two was centered around the basic building blocks of story-telling. The personal anecdotes that people tell and the reflections on why do these certain stories get re-told. I liked that in Act Two, there was more focus on why certain stories are told and how these stories affect personal interactions. In the case of Robert and Tamar, the story is now something shared between them because of a variation in detail.

In Act Three, the reflection raised an interesting issue of why people compare themselves to Rosa Parks. It made me stop and think of how the story of civil rights activists are carried through the years and used (improperly) as analogies. This act shows us how personal interaction is a powerful tool in story telling. The interaction between Rosa Parks and the bus driver is a great image for many people, but many distort the overall interaction that lead to this memorable event.