Just a note that I noticed a post of this site in my Mastodon stream today (and its already floated away and I cannot give credit)
Sure, I can boost and share and move on, but I keep the lessons i learned from Mike Caulfield’s original four moves of the SIFT method for evaluating information on the web, notably T for racing information upstream.
In this case, when I see an interesting post, I am curious about the site where it came from (is there more interesting stuff there? Who or what is behind it? Where else does it lead me). So indeed I spend a few clicks of time learning about Sketchplanations, its creator Jono Hey, how he got started sketching (on paper) visual explanations.
I can appreciate that this could generate an interesting assignment to sketch explanations for jargon or technical terms.
Then I notice that all of the sketches are available under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC license. And this is a skill worth cultivating, in being able to located such resources outside of the main OER collections we may go to first.
Many of them are collections created by individuals. I’d sure like to hear of other valuable, off the beaten track, often specialized, collections of open licensed content worth sharing. Quickly i am thinking of ones like:
- Since this started with the above sketched comic-like collection, one has to appreciate the long running and well known xkcd comics, a vast collection also shared under CC BY-NC
- Another favorite is Open Peeps the vector art representations of diverse people by Pablo Stanley, shared into the public domain using CC0 (one of many other sources collected elsewhere in OEG Connect)
- An old reliable favorite to find music for video/audio projects is Kevin Macleod’s Incompetech where you can find a wealth of thematic instrumental tracks licensed CC BY.
What are your favorite lesser known open licensed collections?
And then just as an accident, when I tried to download one of the Sketchplantion images, it arrived on my computer as a .avif file. I’ve never come across that before? Off I go to Wikipedia to learn more the AV1 Image File Format, which compresses files much better than JPEG (the 41k .avif file converted to 262k as JPEG), at higher quality, and is an open image format.
If you follow links upstream, you learn many more things than just clicking a like or a repost button. That’s how I see the web.