miscellaneous tasks

There have been a number of tasks that have been piling up that are unrelated to the actual design and creation of the Learning Objects. I have a little bit of time, so I’m finding a few of the answers now:

1. Is it okay to use Microsoft clipart?
   1. According to the Microsoft copyright site, it looks like it’s fine for me to use clipart for my class and practicum, but it’s unclear if it’s okay for us to use the clipart for LIB100 use. It distinctly says you can’t use clipart for your business or to make a profit, but it doesn’t say academic institutions are able to use it. I think that if we really want to use the games for classes, we might want to take a few hours to design original artwork.
2. What quality assurance standards are there for shared Learning Objects?
   1. The Merlot website has a short list of things that their peer reviewers are supposed to look for. However, they’re pretty general and appear to lack objective standards by which to measure a given Learning Object.
   2. All other sites I found were even less general, though, so I’m not sure there are any community-defined objective standards.