This video is directly linked to my Learning Journey post! Read it before or after watching this video!
Cheers,
Christopher Sowden
Cheers,
Christopher Sowden
|
This video is directly linked to my Learning Journey post! Read it before or after watching this video! Cheers, Christopher Sowden
3 Comments
At the beginning of OLTD 505: Open Education Resources, I was aware of creative commons and copyright. I was not aware of the many educational resources like resource banks and search engines such as MERLOT and Khan Academy. I was definitely a rookie (and still am a rookie) when it comes to OERs. However, I have learned much in these past six weeks.
OERs (Open Education Resources) are a resource that is freely distributed with the sole intention of sharing information with no intention to profit from it. The other perk of an OER is the ability to redistribute and modify that resource so long as the original rules are followed. Lawrence Lessig, a man that was part of the creative commons movement, was featured in a TED talk. In this talk, he discussed the legalities behind the copyright term and how outdated this legal term is. Copyright is the legal protection of your content from being trespassed on. In other words, you can protect your content from being shared, redistributed, sold, modified, and viewed without your permission. Copyright was originally used to protect physical things before digital products were even a remote possibility. Since copyright law wasn't going to change anytime soon, Creative Commons was born which uses the copyright law to reverse protect content. This means that copyright law was used to protect how the content was distributed so that it could not be sold or restricted. In essence, copyright law was being used to protect the concept of sharing and collaboration in the online community. As a result, people now have many resources to access that is free to use without the threat of Disney issuing a teacher a cease and desist order for showing a Disney movie in class. However, this led me to ask a few questions. #1. What would happen to the Education system if the open movement replaces paid for resources in the education system? #2. Why would people create free resources when they could profit from their work? #3. Who are the financial backers, if any, involved in this process? These questions still linger in the back of my mind and I am not saying resources that are purchased are any less subject to bias than open resources. I am always critical and careful when it comes to reading material. Earlier we had a wonderful presentation from, Clint Lalonde, who talked about the BC campus OpenEd Resources project. This project was in part a BC government sponsored project with the goal of providing post-secondary students with free resources to use for their post secondary education, assuming that the professors and college/universities would also get on board. As a former university student, I support, this project in its entirety. I wonder however, why is the BC government, known for its supreme hatred of teachers and the public education system, supporting a project that would in effect, hurt the coffers of universities/colleges by avoiding book sales. Are there resources of certain types like trades based resources being prioritized over academic resources like psychology or teaching methodologies? What impacts to the economy will occur if online resources beat out paper based resources? I admit I am a little biased as I am a teacher in the public education system. I would like to see this project for post secondary move to the K-12 system. If teachers could access, share, modify resources from around the world and within our own teaching community and save money on outdated textbooks for increased Teacher : Student ratios that would be great! Currently no such plans are in place according to Clint. Time will tell if we can move in that direction. As I learned more about OERs and free data banks, the more it became obvious that what Dean Shareski mentioned in his video, Sharing: The Moral Imperative, that more time will now be spent evaluating resources and filtering them than building or finding them. I admit I have being overwhelmed by the amount of OER banks. It is difficult to know where to start and how to interact with them all, while trying not to drown in information. Even if we don't use the OER banks, as educators, we have all amassed our own banks of resources with some of it being our own creation. The biggest challenge the open movement faces is the overwhelming childishness of every one of us when it comes to our resources. If even a quarter of the educators in this province of BC alone shared their resources, we'd have enough variety of content to teach every grade level and most high school subject matter without even referencing a textbook. As I move forward with my learning, my personal challenges that I must overcome is communicating. I socialize well in F2F settings but give me a Twitter account or Google+ community and I find myself watching rather than participating. Even with Facebook, I have slowed to a near stop with posts and pictures, especially in light of Facebook's content policies. I realize a strong digital footprint requires posting and commenting but I find that I have no strong connection with interacting online, unless it is about a topic I am passionate about, like defending teachers during strike time. It has been a learning journey in more ways than one. I became a part of a Google+ community and shared thoughts and resources. I tweeted a couple times...I'm still a Twitter novice. I even shared my Internet Coding Unit which I drafted entirely on my own and reflects the way I learned how to code when I was attending Vancouver Island University. I look forward to becoming more involved online and becoming more comfortable sharing my thoughts and ideas. Signing off, Christopher Sowden Hello world! I have my Internet Coding unit here that I wish to share with you all! First let me be clear about the following: 1. You may use, print, modify, re-publish in part or whole this resource so long as you credit Christopher Sowden. 2. You may not do the above if your intention is to sell any part or whole of this unit for any amount. 3. The goal is to keep this unit free and available to all so please link this blog entry to yours if you plan on using this resource in part or whole. Now that that is out of the way. Here is the whole unit attached as a .zip file.
When I drafted this unit, I was instructing a Design & Animation 10-12 class and later a Computer Web Applications 11/12 class. This is definitely a high school unit, however with adaptations this can be brought to a lower grade level by creating partially complete templates with the structure and styling complete but adaptable. It is my hope that people can take my work and further advance it so that it may be refined into a solid resource.
I also run a 4 week media literacy program with grade 8's. Some of my program may be found at my class website called Mr. Sowden's Twilight Zone. Again the same rules apply for assignments and resources I have personally generated. This site was also my former site where students collected assignments and interacted with for my first year of teaching. Now I use Edmodo to run my classrooms, which I have found to be a much smoother system than using Weebly. I probably may never have shared my work in this manner if not for this OLTD 505 class and Dean Shareski's video about sharing. See my previous post if you'd like to learn more about Dean Shareski. Anyhow, I hope you enjoy this resource baby of mine! Cheers, Christopher Sowden I recently watched Sharing: The Moral Imperative by Dean Shareski and I was moved by what he had to say about sharing and the impacts other fellow educators' stories that he shared. I learned from Dean that a mere decade or two ago, that resources were scarce and much time was spent finding resources and/or inventing resources to achieve the needs of the educator. Today, that statement is completely opposite of educational sharing. Today resources are so plentiful, educators have to filter and critique resources to find relevant and useful resources that achieve the goals of the educator. Dean talks about our sometimes "childish" behaviour regarding sharing resources with others because they are ours. I personally have seen this behaviour at play and that is to protect their interests in job security. I am also protective of the resources I draft and utilize because I am new to education and I feel any resources I share to a more senior member will hurt my chances to keep the job I have. Dean suggests that as a whole educators in a district, school, and system would be stronger the more we share with each other. While I agree that working together is definitely the stronger system, that same system doesn't reward those who share because at the end of the day if you are the low man on the pole it is you who is cut because you gave someone else the power to take your ship and sail it.
MERLOT, an open educational resource site project that began in 1997 and was sponsored by a variety of partners, including Apple. MERLOT is not actually a database housing free resource materials, rather it links to content found on other servers and sites from around the world. In this way it is the same as the university level databases and search engines except that they often have the file or resource directly. I found that MERLOT has a similar feel and look to many academic search engines like EBSCO host or Academic Search Premier. At first it MERLOT may overwhelm one with the amount of links on their home page, but with some quick scanning one can quickly find the search engine for MERLOT. Above is a screenshot of the advanced search engine of MERLOT. The advanced search options allow for great control over filters and allow searches based on mobile apps as well as author searches. Of course, one can use the basic search, but one will find the need to limit their search down to materials that more likely to be what they are after. After completing a search one will find that again it appears much the same as any other academic search engine. Results are displayed and can be accessed by clicking the resource. Once one has accessed a resource, MERLOT has no influence at all as the resource is entirely separate from MERLOT.
My opinion of this OER is that it can be useful for educators, if they know how to use search terms and tags appropriately. The MERLOT site is fairly user friendly but can lead to issues if the user has little to no experience working with academic based search engines. The resources tend to be of good quality and can be ranked to provide other users an idea of the quality of the resource. The visual layout is simple and a little bland which is good to keep users from being distracted or getting lost with elaborate schemes. MERLOT as a whole would likely be a great resource for other educators at my school since it has many types of materials for different audiences. Copyright has been around for a long time. Most people realize that the letter "c" in a circle means that that content is protected from being copied and redistributed either for profit or not. While I appreciate that copyright protects creators interests and livelihood, copyright has gone too far and also was not made with the internet in mind. An example of this would be music or movies. I remember when MP3 players were becoming a thing and people began copying the music from legally purchased CD's and put them into their MP3 players. The music industry suddenly stepped up their game and began making the music available digitally and then accused the world of breaking copyright laws by copying and distributing their music without permission. I remember then the SOPA/PIPA times when Canada and the US were going to pass legislation that would make it illegal to do this practice. Fortunately, in Canada this horrible bill was stopped by the people. However, both the music and movie industry have begun to tighten their grips on their profits by stating that if you want a digital copy for your MP3 player and a copy for your CD player then you will need to buy both versions. In terms of silliness, this, in my opinion, ranks a 10 on that scale where 10 is absolutely nutty and the white jacket needs to be your friend.
Fortunately, some smart law people banded together to create the Creative Commons licensing system. This concept allows creators of content to share their work protected by copyright with only some rights reserved or stipulations on distribution of their content. This concept became known as "copyleft" meaning the opposite or inverse of what copyright entails. However, copyleft is not a legal term and doesn't mean an abandonment of copyright either. Instead people use the copyright rules to protected the freedom of creation and re-creation of content while protecting the interests of the original creators intent to keep their content free and out of the hands of the for-profit industry. This is done by limiting the re-distribution to must have the same licence as before and must be available freely and adaptable by others. In my opinion, copyright laws need to be updated to reflect the times of the internet. Another idea is to make the copying of content from the web from copyrighted content impossible or nearly so. Of course, this may also be a bad idea however, change of some type needs to occur so that the common user doesn't have to worry about if that picture they copied and placed on a piece of paper and posted on their door will land them in hot water or not. Is copyright too strict? I say yes it is! If people can copyright "Life," then we have issues! Just look at Monsanto and the measures they have taken to protect their GMO (Genetically Modified Organism) products and the insane measures to which farmers are held too despite the fact the cross contamination is nigh impossible to prevent considering that plants specialize at pollinating. Copyright law needs a common sense check. Society needs a common sense check before people start copyrighting GM people. I realize this is a little off topic but I feel that this relates to the general principal of the copyright laws and the importance of making changes now. In my perfect world, consumers would actually "own" what they purchase. Creators could protect their source code from being adapted if they chose. Owners could produce tutorials, video reviews of products, tips, gamer guides without being targeted by copyright infringement. People could create music playlists of games without fear of lawsuits and post information and pics of products so long as credit is given where its due. Piracy would be deemed to be a necessary evil or brought on-board (regulated) where users donate money to the servers and is shared with the creators. As with any "war" against some product or idea (with exceptions) it has always been cheaper and more profitable to regulate rather than prohibit or prosecute. This is where I would like to see the world shift towards rather than tightening their hold on their content. Signing off, Christopher Sowden OERs (Open Education Resources) are a fairly new concept (at least to me) and an example of another "technology" that has evolved at a pace that one cannot follow in its entirety. After watching some videos discussing the creation of Creative Commons and Open Education and delving upon what I have experienced from this program thus far, it is clear that open education is coming to a district near you.
Firstly, as I understand it open education resources are resources that have an open copyright or in other words permission to re-write and deliver to others without financial gain. This idea is great! It takes the founding principle of professionals working and sharing together their expertise to better the world around them. Help thy neighbour as it were. Creative Commons was created as one step to achieve means of legalized creation and re-creation of content without being penalized by the law. Lawrence Lessig mentions that common sense has yet to make its appearance in the digital world and thus the creation of the creative commons license to find some balance in this crazy world we live in. Second, many open resources have begun to bloom on the WWW like Khan Academy and BC's own BC Campus sites. There are many more sites like this and others that focus on specific items like music, pictures, videos, and the like as well. As a teacher of technology, I enjoy this notion of legally providing material that won't get me thrown in jail for breaking some copyright or some student. At the same time though, it is frustrating to live in a world that requires these actions to begin with. In my personal experience, I have watched, read, and listened to many creations by others that have used "copyrighted" material. The funny thing about them all is that in most cases, it unwittingly promotes or advertises the product or idea for free. Yet it seems that the content industry would rather silence that community at all costs. In my mind, it makes no sense. Why silence free advertising? As the saying goes,"Whether good or bad publicity is good publicity." or something along those lines. As a creator of content myself, I of course would be upset to see my hard work taken and re-created into something not what I had intended. So I understand the reasoning behind protecting your content. However, I believe that as long as credit is given to where it is due, then most problems should be avoided. Now the few questions I have with OERs are: Where does the money come from? Is there a hidden agenda? What will happen to other legitimate for-profit institutions if OERs take over the education industry? Nobody works for free. People play and often invent for free in the process but nobody creates content to use for education for free. Where does the money come from? Obama invested $2 Billion in OERs. Seems counter-intuitive to a capitalistic nation to not profit off of as much as possible and provide tax dollars as a result. Who invests in OERs and why? Is there tracking cookies attached/information mining bots? I know that nothing is "free," only free* *Free after completing a promotional offer. Legal speak.... If OERs took over the market for education material, what effect would that have on the major corporations involved in the education market? I don't know if this is even a remote possibility but I do know that if education in the province of BC were to see savings from textbook costs, etc. The current gov't would cut back funding again. As an educator located in BC, I have a hard time trusting any initiative by the current BC government and as such the BC campus initiative is tainted in my eyes and makes me question the validity of such a resource and what motives would this government have to support such an initiative when all this government is concerned about is milking the taxpayer of all their worth when it comes to education and "public" services. I look forward to having my concerns erased and knowledge increased about OERs in this course. Until next time, Christopher Sowden |