This week has really opened my eyes to all the rules and guidelines regarding using other people’s works and research. I have been taught never to plagiarise and to give credit where credit is due but in reality, that was all I knew before this week. Something that fascinated me was when I found out that copyright is assumed automatically and immediately, and can be applied to all works. Now that I know this it seems like basic knowledge but I had always assumed you had to pay to get works copyrighted and protected. This makes me think if I have infringed upon copyright laws in the past and makes me grateful for our last lecture as it possibly could have saved me future trouble. Although, I have only read through the handbook provided, “Copyright Matters”, once now I will most definitely be using it in the future and referring back to it anytime I wish to share anyone else’s works.
What surprises me more is that educators and learners have decided to create a type of license where we can use their works however we please and all that needs to be done is ensure attribution to the creator.
The Creative Commons license is something that gives me a sense of hope (corny, I know), the world we live in often puts a high price tag on things as valuable as knowledge. Luckily, this semester I only had to buy one textbook but I recall last year having to drop quite a lot of dough on some books that I didn’t necessarily end up using as much as I’d hoped considering their prices. When a textbook is written the author(s) write what they want or write for the program the textbook is being designed specifically for. When I buy a textbook for my classes we only end up using a maximum of half the chapters, it feels like a rip-off. So yes, you could say I support the Creative Commons license and appreciate the people who put their work into the world specifically for educational purposes.
Works that are licensed on the Creative Commons license are a wonderful resource for teachers as they are able to remix those works with other works to create exactly what is needed for their own personal lesson. If I personally created an educational resource that I wanted to release as an OER I would license it CC BY. This license allows others to distribute, change, remix, and add to my work as long as they credit me for the original creation. I would want others to have as much access and space to work with my resource as possible. I understand why people do privately license their works as research can take a ridiculous amount of time and money but if I created something that could help others learn and better themselves I don’t think I would want to restrict anyone’s access to that.
Learning about The Open Movement made me feel slightly cheated in my own education but also made me feel empowered to create more open education and to share more resources with my community or whoever I can. I am grateful for all the websites which have open resources available that have been shared with us in class and I intend on using those resources throughout my teaching career.
Thanks for reading! That’s all to reflect on for this week.
