I was just finishing my breakfast (toast with my Dad's excellent homemade rhubarb and pink grapefruit jam - sounds weird, but works really well) when the phone rang. To my surprise it was the east midland tones of Doug Dickinson that cheerily greeted me. The conversation was fairly brief and to the point and went roughly along the lines of "Do you remember that blog post you wrote a couple of weeks back suggesting that the language in the resource uploader in Honeycomb wasn't child friendly? Well, come up with something better, then!" I had to smile - he is absolutely right of course, no point at all in offering criticism without being prepared to suggest an alternative.
The sentence in the resource uploader currently reads as follows:
"I certify I have the right to distribute these resources within the group I have selected"
It looks like this:
The first point to make is that it's great that Softease are thinking about the issue of digital rights. Children ask questions when they get to this point. I have also been very successful in weaning them off standard image search engines and in recent projects year 6 have been tasked to provide an image credit for every image that they put on a web page. Most have managed to do this, and even those that haven't have used Compfight to find Creative Commons images to upload.
So to the crux of the matter: can I come up with a better form of words? Here's my first go:
"I certify that I created this resource, or have permission from its creator to use it"
I am not sure if this is perfect, but I think it's a little easier to understand and explain. Can anybody improve on this?