Kevin's Meandering Mind » comic

When Geeks Get Mad

dogtrax — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 10:39:29 +0000

The latest series in my Boolean Squared comics is all about what happens when the geek kids get picked on by the school bullies. They respond in the only way they know … with technology. Come on in and see what Boolean and Urth are up to when they deal with “the bully boys” at their school.

The twice-weekly comic is found at the Springfield Republican Newspaper. But here is the RSS feed and also my own home to the Boolean Squared collection.

Peace (in kids),
Kevin

Bound by Law: Copyright Comic

dogtrax — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 09:44:37 +0000

This was an interesting find and very helpful. It came out of a discussion going on in a listserv that I am part of with the National Writing Project around fair use of material and the copyright law, which I find rather onerous (even as someone who writes and publishes in a variety of ways) and not at all in sync with the flexible era that we now live in.

Some professors at Duke University put together a very engaging comic explanation of how the copyright laws work, and why they are in place. Also, the short book advocates for some changes to make the fair use aspect of materials more manageable for artists in any medium (including the use of Creative Common licensing).

CSPD Comics

The comic unfolds around the story of a documentary filmmaker trying to determine which footage that she shot of New York City might be troublesome for her movie and along the way, the book gives very good examples of how other movies have run afoul of the copyright laws. For example, there are situations where corporations try to extort (my word) $10,000 from a young filmmaker who accidentally captures a snippet of a copyrighted song in the background of some footage. Ridiculous.

The book was published by Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain and is available for relatively cheap and it is even cheaper if you purchase class sets (four bucks a piece). More information about buying the book is here. Or, in the spirit of this whole endeavor, you can get a free digital download of the book in any variety of styles (flash version, html, pdf, etc) by going here. They even provide a way to remix the book, if that strikes your fancy.

This comic is worth a look if you work with students still trying to get a grasp on why you can’t just take any thing in the world and remix it and put it on YouTube. Or why some songs are just off limits for some projects. And if you are like me and believe in your heart that all art (music, paintings, books, etc.) should be free and accessible to anyone (even though you acknowledge this is not reality — people want to get paid for their creative time), it is still valuable to know the law and this comic gives a great overview of the legal aspects of copyright protection.

Peace (in trademarked symbols),
Kevin

Your Days in a Comic

dogtrax — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 13:10:43 +0000

Thanks to everyone who submitted their Day in a Comic. It was quite amusing to get them in my email bin. I struggled with how to present them all — I tried making a little movie but the text became too small and unreadable. I tried a slideshow but the new Edublogs platform doesn’t seem to want to have the flickr slideshow that I used to use.

So I am providing you with a link to the Flickr Slideshow and I hope you travel there and get a chuckle and/or insight out of the comic creations of this week.

Or, you can follow these contributors names to their comics:

If you want to make a comic, the tools we used were either Make Beliefs Comics or ToonDoo or the Read-Write-Think Site, but there are plenty of other sites out there that are easy for us and our students to use.

If you sent me a comic but I did not get it or post it, please let me know. And you can still link to your comic in the commenting section of this post, if you were a bit — ahem — tardy or occupied with real life this week.

Peace (in the funny pages),
Kevin