Photoshop Express

I know I am a little late on this one but Adobe Photoshop Express Beta launched on Wednesday of this past week. I did not have time to play with it until this morning. It seems pretty cool. It is a free version of Photoshop Express to do online preparation for uploading photos to websites. It is great for those who travel and do not always have access to their full version of Photoshop. Or it could be a boon to schools who can't afford a site license for Photoshop because a single copy is out of some price ranges. It is very cool that now everyone can use the famous Adobe tool; another leveling of the playing field, a flattening of the world and the classroom.
But, like everything else that is “free” on the web, there are strings. And apparently these strings are attached forever to your photos. According to C/net News, Adobe wants creative control over your content. There is a statement in the user agreement that I didn't read -does anyone read those things before agreeing to use a product online? Anyway, the statement reads like this:

“Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed.” *

So what are we signing when we agree to use this product? I would hate to edit a picture on the Photoshop Express site and then have it show up in a “how not to take pictures” video from Adobe later down the road. I also would hate to be a bride and find my wedding pictures on an Adobe commercial. Supposedly Adobe is modifying its terms of agreement but I think I am just going to hold off using it with pictures of my students, I am going to hold off teaching it to my elementary students too. I need to play with it a bit more before I open it up to everyone. I also have to check and see if my school district even will allow us to use it since it means uploading photos to the site and we have no control over the photos once they are uploaded. Remember what David Pogue said at PETE & C... "content on the web does not stay where you put it."

Recharging my Digital Batteries...

So, I am finally getting to blog about this thanks to a two hour delayed school opening. I took a personal day on Monday and paid to go to one day of my state’s technology conference. Why you ask. Well, simply because the best technology journalist in the country was the keynote speaker on Monday and I got to meet him. Am I gushing? Come on, he's from the NY Times! I used to be a reporter and now I am a librarian. I know how tough it can be out there establishing contacts to get the best stories. And, this guys has the contacts, gets the best stories, and gets them right. I could not wait for my fellow educators to hear his view of technology.

I have been a big fan of David Pogue for a while and now thanks to Pogue’s inspiring keynote so is the technology coordinator in my school. In fact, my tech coordinator took this picture of me with David. I am such a technology geek. But you know how it is, you read someone’s blog, read their column, and listen to him or her on various podcasts for so long and you feel you know them. (Sounds like what used to be said about television.) And, David Pogue gets it. He knows people know him from the web and he’s OK with that. He is friendly and besides, he appeared on Cali Lewis’ podcast, he actually met Cali! And, if Cali gets her mobile home and travels around the country like she and Neil are planning, she may get somewhere close enough for me to meet her too, podcasting from the road, it doesn’t get much better than that! Anyway, back to David Pogue’s keynote… it was enlightening as well as entertaining. He changed the words of “My Way” and sang about the iPhone and really nailed it about the cool factor. It is cool to have an iPhone! But more than that, he told this group of educators what the future looks like.

He called his presentation, “The Digital Generation Grows Up.” The first two things he says will mark the future are Internet phones and wireless everywhere. First, he sees landline telephones going away as more and more people use voice over IP or the Internet as a phone. T-Mobile was the first to introduce wireless cell plans that include free calling when in a wireless Internet hot spot. This goes hand in hand with his second biggie, he foresees wireless Internet everywhere and more collaboration on a worldwide stage because of it. And, of course all-wireless Internet phones like the much hyped currently vapor-ware Google Phone. He pointed out that just those using VOIP now have driven down the cost of landline calls by 30 percent.

The next thing he anticipates is a greater expansion of Web 2.0 but not without challenges, as more and more people supply content to the Web. He wanted teachers to tell their students that once things are online, they are there forever and they don’t stay where you put them. He also put a plug in for copyright because a college survey showed him students think everything on the Web is free and out there just for them to download. He realizes the question of legitimate sources is a real one and he’d like to see a code of ethics for bloggers. So, David Pogue gets it, he knows what librarians are saying is true. Our new library standards include ethics and bias. So maybe the best thing we can teach our students is to judge for themselves (Is that not what we are doing when we give them an Internet evaluation form?) what is worth reading and a little discernment.