Seamless Services?: OpenAttribute

From SCSpaeth PicasaWeb

ITeam has been exploring ways to help ourselves, peers, teachers and others to understand issues of digital citizenship associated with Creative Commons and related licences and attribution. We have looked at site-specific tools at Wikimedia Commons and found them to work inconsistently. Flickr has a similar tool. Unfortunately, site-specific tools, add a burden for learning how to use multiple tools.

So, I was excited to learn recently that Mozillians have taken on the challenge of attribution and begun a Drumbeat project, OpenAttribute to improve attribution. The OpenAttribute Project is creating Firefox and Chrome extensions that intend to simplify and unify attribution. This approach might make it easier for ITeam members to encourage and support best practices for this aspect of digital citizenship.

Molly Kleinman writes about the development of the idea in her post Announcing Open Attribute:

Workshops and how-to guides and step by step flowcharts haven’t reduced the confusion, so we thought, “What if we can just create attributions automatically? Like the citation generators in academic databases? Click a button and you can have a properly formatted citation in MLA style, APA style, Chicago style. Technically, there is no reason why we couldn’t do a similar thing for attribution.”

So, I installed both the Firefox and Chrome OpenAttribute extensions and tested in a couple likely sites. I got mixed results from this software that is still under development. As I worked, I thought about Ari's post on the Sketchpad.cc blog about using screencasts to help developers improve their software. He cites Dennis Daniel's substantial effort to give YouTube feedback to the Sketchpad.cc project. Dave Humphrey at Seneca College in Toronto encourages his students to make real contributions to real projects. Could this be our contribution to Open Educational Resources?

It works for this Seamless Services? blog but the generated html can't be put in comments.