No two ways about it: Here’s something we’ve got to do better.
Alan Levine knows technology. He is a creative guy who did pioneering work on the web in the 1990s, was an early proponent of blogs and RSS and shares his ideas and discoveries at CogDogBlog. And, like everyone who creates, he deserves credit for his work.
Here’s where our paths crossed—and why we’re backing up to take a different fork.
A year ago or so, Levine was visiting a friend whose son enjoys the DS106 Daily Create—a nifty space that publishes “challenges” every day to promote spontaneous creativity. They wound up proposing a board game, which spurred some nice submissions here. Levine jumped in himself, redoing the classic Monopoly board and blogging about the work. He writes: “That photo got like 15,000 views and was selected for Flickr explore. I put some effort into it, because I enjoy the arc of creativity.”
So do we. And so as we were hunting around for an image to use with an end-of-the-year story about MOOCs, we came upon Levine’s design. Perfect illustration, right?
Over the years we’ve been publishing, EdSurge has built our own home-grown content management system. That gives us a lot of freedom—but it also means we need to be vigilant about everything that has to do with display—including how we credit illustrations. We do credit them but as Levine points out, our approach has been too perfunctory and doesn’t provide a clear enough trail for people to find the original illustrations.
Levine pointed all this out in a recent blog post here.
So we’ll fix it.
Levine finishes up his post with this observation:
“I’ll keep attributing because (a) it’s an act of gratitude that is deserved; and (b) it’s frigging easy. Just make it your habit.”
We will. Thanks for nudge with the, um, pointy stick.
