Free, Lively Images via Morguefile

When teachers ask me where they can get free image reference resources for various multimedia projects, I steer them to MorgueFile. It's a site that contains digital imagery that has been supplied by numerous photographers and artists around the world. What makes MorgueFile so appealing is that the images that reside there are high resolution and copyright free!

NECC 2008: Opening Up to Open Source

Too cool!

Here I am in San Antonio, Texas at the Gonzalez Convention Center sitting in the Open Source Lab session listening to Steve Hargadon discuss free resources. I've heard Steve present before and, as always, it's a pleasure to get access to his fresh ideas and opinions. This post--the one you're reading--is being written on an old, IBM ThinkPad that has no harddrive. It's a PC that's part of a thin client network. There's a room full of these normally useless, obsolete machines that are being used for blogging, word processing, multimedia, and other tasks. Imagine what might happen if a system or school decided to make better use of its old machines rather than tossing them out or surplusing them.

A World of Data to Explore: GE-Graph

Although it's hard to believe, the wildly robust features of Google Earth can be made even better. Case in point: GE-Graph. This nifty, freeware application handily generates impressive graphs from kml files saved by Google Earth.