FFotW: La Rochelle

Vieux Port - France (La Rochelle), originally uploaded by Chez Julius.

Wouldn't you love to hone your French language skills in beautiful La Rochelle?

Well, you can! La Rochelle is one of our many Study Abroad opportunities at CofC. Contact Dr. Tefo Attafi for details. Dr. Attafi will be giving an information session on the upcoming trip on Wednesday, October 21 at 3:00 pm in the main classroom of the Language Resource Center, ECTR 225.

Thanks to Julius Singara, Chez Julius on Flickr, for sharing this great picture of the port's two towers with a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license (meaning he asks, please give him attribution if you use the photo, and please make no commercial or derivative uses of the image).

Flickr Find of the Week: Isabel Allende and the Dalai Lama

Isabel Allende and His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, originally uploaded by Bill Liao.

For our first Flickr Find of the Week this semester, how would you have like to have dinner with Chilean writer Isabel Allende and the Dalai Lama? As with all FFofW images, this great pic is shared with a Creative Commons license, this one by Bill Liao. A CC license is a type of copyright by which the creator declares his or her wish that their work be shared openly. Thanks, Bill!

Those of you who attended our Welcome Week celebration got to watch and discuss Allende's Tales of Passion TED Talk. If you weren't there, catch up on what you missed below. TED shares our commitment to the open exchange of ideas!

FFotW: Linux on the LRC Checkout Laptop

LRC Checkout Laptop Screen, originally uploaded by languagelab.cofc.

Times are tough, and the Lab's checkout laptop, from circa 2003, just can't functionally run Windows anymore. Windows is just too slow on a machine that old. Most faculty who use the laptop only need PowerPoint or to use the Web - teachable moment: ask me about alternatives to Powerpoint for your presentations.

Back to the topic at hand... Ubuntu to the rescue. The laptop runs fine under lightweight and sensible Linux. Note that we have fudged the OpenOffice shortcuts a bit to make users more comfortable with their Word and Powerpoint files. :)

Neither the new Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) nor recent its predecessors will send the display to a projector, which is pretty much what the machine gets checked out for. So we rolled back to Breezy Badger, which handles external display fine.

We should mention, thanks to user j / f / photos for the great image used for our desktop:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/good-karma/13622 73975/

We're all about the Creative Commons here at the CofC Language Resource Center.

Flickr FotW: Strasbourg

Rainy Strasbourg - La Petite France, originally uploaded by MorBCN.

For the first week of the Spring 09 semester, let's take a view of Strasbourg in Alsace. Check out all the languages in the comments on the Flickr photo page (just click the image to go to its original page on Flickr).

As with last week and all Flickr Finds of the Week, this a Creative Commons licensed image, free for you to use and share under certain conditions prescribed by the copyright holder, in this case Flickr user MorBCN of Barcelona.

I was ready to repeat my "What is Creative Commons?" spiel, but I think our Catelan friend has summed it up quite well in his profile:

I like to photograph anything

I'm not copyrighting my pictures. I don't believe in copyright. I think that copyright is a bad thing for culture in the digital age and for sharing knowledge and creations… I use Creative Commons: some rights reserved. My pictures are licensed using Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

In short: you can use my pictures for non comercial purposes, and you must atribute my pictures to me with a link to the original picture or my flickr photostream.

My pictures are not free. Read carefully the following description of the cases when you can use it, and what to do:

Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. You can use or print any of my pictures for personal use, in your blog, your web-page or your kitchen. If you want to use it commercially, send me an e-mail, and we will have a deal.

Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor. Then, you must attribute any of my pictures to "Mor (bcnbits)" and make a link to this page or a link to the original picture. If you drop me an email would be nice.

Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.

So enjoy, and use this picture and any of MorBCN's others in class! He has great photos from all over Europe!