Digital Literacy

Digital Literacy

This week's topic, digital literacy, was fun for me. I had never heard the phrase the digital literacy before this class the term was new to me, however I have always been somewhat tech savvy. I have not explored very many programs however, as far as creating media. I thought the videos were really interesting especially the three little pigs video. It was really cool the way that they took a classic old story and put a new twist on it, as well as used new digital literacy to make the video very interesting. The way that the photos, videos, and text overlapped each other made the video seem complex, a lot like the story line; solving the crime of the houses being blown down. Whenever I have seen media like this, I always notice that these things make it look better, however I never really thought about the work that goes into it. When I took on this weeks assignment, I got a little bit of an idea, and I now know I have a lot more to learn.

My Meme

I have always loved art and photography, so digital literacy is a cool way to bring those together. That is why this weeks assignment was fun for me because I got to find a good picture and design with it whatever message that I wanted. When I first started the project, I did not think it was going to be very difficult because I like to edit my photos a lot. However, I had a hard time trying to figure what I wanted to make a meme of, and my original idea actually gave me some trouble. I wanted to overlap photos and it took me a while and I had to try a couple different programs. When I eventually figured out how to do it using the program fotor, I changed my mind about what I wanted to do. So in the end I ended up using Picmonkey. I thought that it was a really good program for beginners because it was really simple, however you can't download your finished product without paying after a week. I also checked out pixlr and I thought that it looked like an awesome photo editor, however it was a little complicated for me to start out on. I chose to do this meme because it is a really big debate right now with everything going on with other countries. I found the image on google images, but I used the usage rights tool to find an image for uncommercial use with modification. I played around with a lot of different filters, text fonts, and colors until it looked the way that I wanted it to.

Fair Use & Copyright

What I Knew

Fair Use and Copyright are very important things to understand when working with media. I always knew that we needed to sight our sources when using someone else's work for classes, but I didn't know the rules of who could use what, and for what reasons. I also did not know what Fair Use was, and I learned that Copyright is the law that gives the owner control over their work for a certain amount of time, and Fair Use is sort of an exception to that law that says people can use it in certain circumstances. 

What I Discovered

I wondered if you had to do something in order to get a copyright, but Purdue's website answered that question when it said that a work becomes copyrighted when it is written or recorded. Fair Use, I had never heard of before, but I have been using all through school when I used media off of the internet for school projects. Through the readings I discovered that there are a number of factors that can make it possible to use part of someone else's work without asking permission. It depends on the purpose that you are using it for, the nature of the original work, how much of the work you are using, how important the part you are using is, if it will effect the work's market, and lastly if it is transformative. Transformative means that it is being used in a new way that is different from its original use. 

Why it is Useful

Things like school projects or educational presentations are examples of uses that are covered under Fair use. Even though Fair use let's you use people's work without asking, you may still have to site the source that you got it from so that you are giving them credit for their work. There are a lot of resources out there to help find media that you are able to reuse and even modify. 

Examples

I found this picture on Google but I used the advanced search options to find pictures labeled for uncommercial reuse with modification, and the original source of the picture was Wikimedia. I think that this is a good way to find usable pictures because it gives you a lot to choose from, where some of the other options give you less to choose from.

This photo I found using iStock which is a website that has images that are free to use. I found this website on the article that we were assigned, "The Ultimate Guide to Finding Free Legal Images Online". I thought that it gave me a lot of really good pictures to choose from so it was great in that aspect, however the iStock watermark is across all of them. I chose both of these photos because sunsets and dogs are two of my favorite things!

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maui_-_Sunset.jpg

http://www.istockphoto.com

https://www.lib.purdue.edu/uco/CopyrightBasics/basics.html#1

Multimedia

What is Multimedia

From what I know about multimedia so far, I understand that it uses more than one type of media such as picture, sound, text, video, and sometime animation however that is disputed. This could range from text and photo, to text and video, to text video and sound, and so on.

Where is it Used

Multimedia is used a lot in commercials on television, for training employees, teaching children, or even raising awareness for situations like the storms in Texas and Florida. Business use it in advertising, teachers in their presentations, and people everywhere are using multimedia to communicate ideas to people in a way that will catch their eye and is a lot more interesting to watch. Today, technology is an extremely important part of life, especially in communicating with others, and multimedia lets us communicate better across technology. If we were only able to send text for example, you would not be able to communicate emotion or show the other person or people what you are talking about. If you could only send a photo, the recipient would have no explanation. While there is a time a place for texting and sending photos, it is not always an effective way of communicating, so multimedia makes it possible to get the entire message across.

Web Apps

I was not clear on what a web app was, or more so what wouldn't be a web app. The article "What is a Web App?" said that it was an app that used a web browser to complete a task over a network. However, if even just informing you on a certain subject is a task, then it seems like there wouldn't be much that wasn't a web app. So my understanding is that any app that you are using online for a purpose is a web app. These are useful for everyone, as we all use the in our everyday lives. All of Google's apps that a lot of people for school and work are web apps, but also businesses create websites where you can purchase goods, contact the business, and many other things which is a great way to expand a customer base.

Example: New York Times

The New York Times website is an example of a web app because it provides people with news and weather that they want to know about. The website has an example of multimedia with the video of hurricane Irma that includes video clips of the storm, a news anchor talking, and the words that the news anchor was saying in text to make it easier to understand.
https://nyti.ms/2xUxZzr