December 11, 2008

We are listening!

At a recent Softease staff gathering I talked about the power and use of Blogs with specific reference to those being written by our customers. Staff that don’t get the opportunity to meet directly with teachers and pupils, such as designers, developers and support staff, can often have a insight into how their developments, ideas and suggestions are being received and used. This has had a direct result already. John Sutton an ICT teacher at Chorlton Park Primary school has been blogging about his year 6 pupils using Honeycomb. He has opened up a debate about some wording that Softease have used. Here is the blog entry. and here is an extract from the blog……..

The sentence in the resource uploader currently reads as follows:

“I certify I have the right to distribute these resources within the group I have selected”

It looks like this:

The first point to make is that it’s great that Softease are thinking about the issue of digital rights. Children ask questions when they get to this point. I have also been very successful in weaning them off standard image search engines and in recent projects year 6 have been tasked to provide an image credit for every image that they put on a web page. Most have managed to do this, and even those that haven’t have used Compfight to find Creative Commons images to upload.

So to the crux of the matter: can I come up with a better form of words? Here’s my first go:

“I certify that I created this resource, or have permission from its creator to use it”

I am not sure if this is perfect, but I think it’s a little easier to understand and explain. Can anybody improve on this?

Here is your opportunity to join the discussion. We at Softease would like to get this right for all the users of Honeycomb, whether you are 5, 15 or 25 years of age (or anything in between or beyond!).

For clarification. You get this message when you are about to bring a resource ( image, video or sound) into Honeycomb, to use in pages that you are creating as part of a ‘group’ that you belong to. This could be a curriculum group, interest/social group or into your own personal resource bank for use anywhere within Honeycomb.

If you think the wording we have used should be improved, then please leave your suggestions here or on John Sutton’s blog. We want to get it right!

I looked up the word ‘certify’ in Visual Thesaurus and these are some of the words suggested - declare, licence, indorse and hold. If you can’t see this, you may like to try it for yourself.