Fear of the Mouse?

The mouse has disappeared now! And the era of sharing and reusing of digital resources is on the frontier. This is a brilliant opportunity we have for quick and quality teaching and learning; thanks to the emergence of the web 2.0. But are we now in the same state of “what would happen if I click on this button” in terms of openness and sharing? Me, compelled to say yes. From “Is my work worth to share?” to “Will I be plagiarising if I use Picture X in my teaching material?” I have thousands of questions before sharing, remixing, resuing etc.

My students are far ahead of me on this subject in my opinion. But as a teacher, I always have more responsibility and tend to think twice before opening the doors and windows of learning. It is inevitable that in a learning environment,  having almost same knowledge in multi-dimensional modes, such as text written in different styles, videos created with different perspectives, and audios of many fashions etc., allows tailoring a mode and style of learning that fit into many stereotypes. Students anyway go for quick and easy ways of learning besides the teachers’ notes and literature. Those born before computers visited libraries, but students in the digital age “I Find Google a lot Easier than Going to the Library Website.” Ranging from Youtube videos to Dummies (http://www.dummies.com/) nowadays provide efficient and effective learning opportunities. I tired dummies myself; googling ” Dummies for learning styles” ended up here “https://www.gynzy.com/teachers/smart-board-basics/the-dummies-guide-to-pedagogy/“; well, not so bad as first-hand information.

But, how practical, legal and ethical is it to include open source resources into academic courses or include them into a list of recommended readings? What is the proportion of open resources allowed to use in a course in formal education? If the knowledge is freely available, why do students pay for it at universities? These are the questions I always have back in my mind when I think of using other’s works in my teaching.

Education has been changed a lot from the old school where the knowledge can be gained only by physically attending and listening to teachers. Knowledge is now available at the fingertip, and not only students but the teachers should be able to use it. Spending hours on reformulating definitions, theories, concepts, reproducing structures, figures, graphs etc; how worth is that? One of my colleagues once said; be creative, do something more interesting than trying to be authentic in a known theory; when students have to solve something they will go through any lousy text to find answers. Good advice, but need to be aware of things like “She Didn’t Teach. We Had to Learn it Ourselves.”.

The legal aspect of sharing resources has become easier to tackle with services such as creative commons licenses.  However, one has to be really aware of how to use such material and what different licenses mean, what conditions apply when more than one resources are blended together etc. Methods such as the Table 1 copied from Creative Commons archive, are very helpful in knowing how the licensing condition varies for blended resources.

Table 1: Which cc material can be remixed?

Sharing the lecture notes has become a norm in the present classroom. Students might be using other modes of sharing than the institution’s LMS. Therefore teachers nowadays have to think about how could they protect their intellectual properties while allowing the students (and others?) to use them. What would be the case if a student records your lecture and share it on social media? Should we insert cc to every slide in a presentation? For eg., I create a very nice diagram after a quite a lot of effort, and one of my students took a photo of it during the lecture and post it on Twitter with a tag opinion of his own. Who has the copyright to it? I think I am still at the level of kindergarten of this knowledge.