Category Archives: Open Online Courses

Blogging on blogging again: more meta!

Screen shot of the title of this blog, You're the Teacher, set against an image of misty mountains with a tree in the foreground.

Metapic

I’m joining the DS106 Radio Summer Camp this week, and Jim Groom put out an invitation to all of us to join in a session today about blogging called “Blog or Die!” Why does blogging rule all media, as Jim asked? I thought I’d blog a few notes about blogging as prep for joining this session.

I seem incapable of writing blog posts under 2000 words, but for this one I’m really gonna try!

Benefits of blogging myself

I started blogging in 2006, after learning about WordPress and blogs from the amazing Brian Lamb (who was at the University of British Columbia at the time, but who is now doing fantastic work over at Thompson Rivers University). Funny enough, one of my first posts was called “Why blog?”. Coming around to the same theme I guess!

In reading over that post I find it still resonates with me eighteen years later. Benefits of blogging I wrote back then:

Reflecting on teaching and learning so as to improve
Sharing back with others, since I have learned so much from those who have shared their reflections
Connecting with a community
Thinking things out for oneself and being able to find those reflections fairly quickly later

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Values-based tugging

Statue of a dog with a rope in its mouth as if playing tug of war with someone.

Tug of war statue by David Ellis, licensed CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 on Flickr

Okay, so the title of this post may seem a little strange but bear with me. Yesterday I listened to a fantastic session by Dave Cormier for the DS106 Radio Summer Camp this week, called “A year of uncertainty – fighting the fight against the RAND corporation.” I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, as I hadn’t managed to find the abstract/description of this session until after it was over (click on the session link on the schedule for the summer camp), but I knew Dave is amazing, so of course I had to listen! And it was very thought-provoking as I figured it would be.

Problem solving and uncertainty

One of the main points Dave was talking about was in how many aspects of our social, political, educational, and other lives are focused on problem-solving, on addressing well-defined problems that can have well-defined answers that we just need to work hard to find. This is not necessarily a problem in itself, Dave noted, as there do exist such problems and there can be very useful methods for working to address them. The issue is if we focus on that to ignore the less-easily-defined problems, the messier issues, the more uncertain situations where a single right answer is not going to be forthcoming no matter what kinds of problem-solving methodologies we throw at it.

Dave mentioned medical students coming out of their education into practice and, when confronted with complex, uncertain, grey areas where a medical solution isn’t immediately forthcoming they tended to focus on blaming themselves, as if it was their failure for not finding an answer where none was to be found. He also noted how, at least in English, it is common when someone asks a question like “what is your view of X,” or “is Y right or wrong,” you feel like you have to answer, even if you aren’t sure, or there isn’t a clear-cut answer. It’s just part of the accepted norms of speaking that you should have an answer.

Both of these resonated with me, and perhaps especially the second; I have sometimes been asked, in various contexts, to provide my view on something that is of a more uncertain nature, or to say if I think it’s right, or to say what I think the future will bring, and I do feel pressured to respond. But maybe because of my background in philosophy I’m actually pretty comfortable with saying that I am not sure, or I’d need to look into it more, because such situations really do require more thought, research, reflection before coming to a conclusion.

There is the danger of jumping in too quickly with an answer, but there is also a danger in spending too much time in the thinking and reflection and not moving past that towards making some kind of decision or other. And sometimes I get stuck in that latter step when faced with really complex issues–there is so much to consider and so much value in multiple perspectives that it can be hard to “land” somewhere, as it were. It’s tempting to remain up in the air while not being sure of which alternatives are best (because there are no easy answers).

Landing on values and pulling from there

I really appreciated where Dave landed in his presentation: rather than only feeling stuck, suspended, we can consult our values and make a move based on those, we can tug the rope in a tug of war in the direction of our values and work to move things from there. The focus on values is key here: ask yourself what are your values as they relate to this situation, and make decisions and act based on those, knowing that’s enough in uncertain situations. Which doesn’t mean, of course, that you can’t revisit your values and how they apply to the situation if either of those things changes, but that it’s a landing place and it’s solid enough for the moment. He talked about how we can have conversations with students and others about why we would do something in a particular situation, rather than what the right answer is, focusing on the values that are moving us.

To do so requires that we are clear about what our values are, which is in some cases more easily said than done. This is something near and dear to my heart as a philosopher, as trying to distill what is underlying our views and our decisions, what kinds of reasons and values, is part of our bread and butter. But when I reflect on how I’ve taught over the years, I’m not sure I’ve focused as much as I could have on helping students be clear about their values, instead focusing on the “content” of course quite a bit. The latter has been in the service of helping students understand that when we make ethical choices there are (or should be) reasons behind those, and some options as to what kinds of reasons those could be. I, like many other philosophers, have then also asked students to provide their own arguments related to various ethical and other philosophical questions, which does at times mean providing reasons based on values. But how much have I really spent time supporting students to define and articulate their own values in addition to applying them through writing arguments? I’m not sure, and this session was really generative for me in thinking about that (as well as being generative in multiple other ways!).

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog post as part of MYFest 2022, talking about how I had a hard time imagining a more just future for education just because I kept focusing on all of the structural complexities involved in educational systems and how changing one thing would require changing many more interconnected aspects and … it all felt pretty overwhelming. The metaphor I used was of rocks and boulders, which came to me as I was passing multiple rock formations on a walk. Some piles rocks are fairly easy to move; others are locked into network like shapes where to move one would require moving all the others, and they are after all very heavy. If I think in these terms then of course it’s hard to imagine change. Things are literally set in stone!

Rocks of different shapes and colours tightly packed together with little space in between, such that if you tried to move one you'd have to move all the others to do so.

Rocks photo by Christina Hendricks, licensed CC BY 2.0 on Flickr.

But what if we thought about complex issues and structures more like flexible webs? (Which is an image that reminds me of other of Dave Cormier’s work such as that on rhizomatic learning.) So that if you tug on one part it can still move and the other parts will move as well (or break I suppose, which in some cases may not be a bad thing).

Spider web covered in tiny drops of water against a blurred background.

Spider web photo by Terri Bateman, CC0 on Flickr.

This feels more hopeful to me–it still respects the interconnectedness of structures but also notes there can be some movement, some wiggle room. Perhaps the spider web is too flexible to respect the challenges of moving some of the more entrenched structures, though. Even though spider silk is incredibly strong, it seems a bit too easy to just sweep away with the swoosh of one’s hand.

How about a net:

Net made of medium-sized ropes tied together tightly in a square pattern, with one bit fraying a little.

Net photo by screenpunk licensed CC BY NC 2.0 on Flicker.

This feels stronger, and like a spider web, meant to catch and hold things tight, but which can still be moved, shaped, morphed, or even broken. I like the image above because a piece of the net is fraying, noting its fragility amidst the otherwise tight knots.

A line that Dave ended on will stick with me: “Ask yourself what you care about, and then do what you can.” That feels empowering.

Applying to AI

One of the things that feels uncertain to me in this moment is where things are going with AI, what the future holds, and what the best approaches are to using AI (or not!) in education. How might those of us who are educators address the question of whether and/or how to adopt AI in our courses, in our teaching practices, to encourage our students to use it, etc.? Of course, all of this is going to differ according to context, discipline, teaching and learning goals, and more. But I think Dave’s session provides a fruitful way to approach this question. This is a complicated and uncertain situation but what we can do is consult our values: what do we value, what do we care about, what do we want to promote and avoid?

This may seem fairly elementary in a way–might we already frequently act from our values? Maybe, but there are also times when I know I have done things in teaching because they just seemed like the usual thing to do, what I had experienced, that they just seemed right and “normal,” but when I took a step back to think about my values and what I care about then things changed. For example, I used to get upset when people would leave during the middle of class, until I reflected on how I care about supporting students to learn in the ways that are helpful for them, coupled with learning about how some students need to move around, or to take breaks from stimulation, or need to leave for other reasons. It’s still not easy, especially in small courses, but I’m focusing less on how I feel in that situation and more on how being able to take a break may be helpful for some students more than sitting in one place for 50-80 minutes.

It’s perhaps that previous point about taking some time to reflect on one’s values, what is important, what one cares about, and then applying to one’s teaching practice. At one point last year I took the time to write out my values in terms of leadership, and that was immensely helpful in focusing my attention on areas I wanted to work on. I may have acted from some of those automatically, but bringing them to the surface helped me not only see what was grounding some of my actions but also where I professed values but that my actions could do a better job of supporting.

Now, this process isn’t going to lead to easy answers (there are none for the kinds of issues Dave was talking about), and our values may lead to conflicting viewpoints. For example, I care about allowing students to use technology that will support their learning, and I think that generative AI may be helpful for student learning in some cases–I’ve been looking into how it can support students with various disabilities, for example, and should blog about that later. Then there is the value of equity and how not all students have equal access to generative AI tools, so some may get supports that others don’t. But digging into what one values can help clarify why to go one direction or another, putting one on more solid footing while starting to tug, even if one isn’t entirely sure that is the best direction. It is the best one for this moment while recognizing the complexity that makes it a difficult, but at least grounded, choice.

And if we go with the net metaphor, then tugging in one place can pull other threads, moving things in a local area to start, and maybe in larger areas over time. Particularly if more people are tugging in similar directions (organized action, e.g.). One person can make a difference, but it is more likely that many, working together, can make a larger difference. And we may fray that net to the point of finding ways to morph or break some of the confining structures we find ourselves in.

All of this is also bringing to mind the idea of “entangled pedagogy” from Tim Fawns, which I wrote a blog post about in 2022. Rather than reviewing that blog post, I’ll just say that he has an aspirational view of the relationship between technology and pedagogy in which we focus on purposes, values, and contexts in an entangled relationship with technology and pedagogy. Rather than trying to emphasize pedagogy over technology or vice versa, or even how they are connected to each other, we focus instead on the purposes and the values we have in teaching and learning, and the specificity of our contexts, and how those can shape our choices in both pedagogy and technology (and how they intertwine).

In a quote that resonates with some of what Dave said and what I’ve written here, Tim notes:

Attending to values, purposes and context can help us identify problematic assumptions, such as those embedded in simple solutions to complex problems, reductive characterisations of students (e.g. as ‘digital natives’, see Oliver 2011), or assertions that teachers should conform to modern digital culture and practices (Clegg 2011).

Conclusion

I really appreciated the opportunity to participate in this session with Dave. There was a lot more than what I’ve been able to talk about above, so I highly suggest you listen to the recording when it’s posted on the DS106 Radio Summer Camp recordings page (and check out other fantastic sessions while you’re at it of course!). Big thank you to Dave for a thought-provoking session!

Lisa Jackson: Savage (IndieEdu200x)

I am taking a MOOC from UBC called Reconciliation Through Indigenous Education, and during week 2 one of the resources for the course was a short film by Anishinaabe filmmaker Lisa Jackson, called Savage (2009).

SAVAGE from Lisa Jackson on Vimeo.

This is such a powerful and thought-provoking film packed into only six minutes, I wanted to do some reflection on it as part of my belated responses to the 9x9x25 blogging challenge. Given that my last post was quite long, I’m counting it as two (numbers 4 and 5), so this is number 6 out of 9!

Description

The film begins with gorgeous shots of a young girl riding in a car watching the scenery go by. It seems a peaceful and beautiful atmosphere. It looks like early morning when the video starts, and the girl is being driven as the sun is coming up. A man is driving the car but we don’t see his face and it’s not clear who he is or where they’re going. The car is an old one, looking like it’s from the 1950s or 60s.

Soon we see a woman in a kitchen singing a lullaby (the description of the video on Vimeo says it’s in Cree). One gets the sense that this woman is the young girl’s mother. Her dress and the kitchen décor also suggest an era around perhaps the 1950s.

The scene, to me, feels very lonely and sad, even though the song is beautiful. The woman is sitting by herself at a table drinking tea, or sweeping the floor, or washing up…always by herself, looking off into the distance. She is looking off to her right as the young girl looks off to her right out the window of the car (these scenes are interspersed together). The lullaby is about a baby’s canoe being the moon flying among the clouds… “fly, baby, fly … but you must come back to me.” This ties into the profound loneliness of the scene.

The mother’s song ends as the car comes to a stop and the girl is led by the hand into a building where her hair is washed and cut, and she is helped into new clothes to emerge standing in a school. The music changes from peaceful to stressful as the woman cries, over and over, “you must come back to me!” Suddenly the scene changes to one of horror and anguish: the girl standing in a school in a new uniform and haircut seems like a sinister and horrifying scene. What have they done to her? We are about to find out.

This is where things get very interesting and surprising, at least to me. We see a classroom of students all with heads down, writing in notebooks. When the teacher leaves the class one looks up and it’s clear: they have become zombies. They all begin a synchronized dance that, in one respect, emphasizes their uniformity and how they all follow the same tune, blindly, dead-like. And yet, later on, two boys in turn take solos and do quite impressive moves on their own.

Finally, the teacher returns and the children scramble to their desks to work quietly on their schoolwork once more.

Reflection

This film expresses the Indian Residential School experience from the parent and child’s perspectives, including the sadness, anger, anguish and horror. But towards the end I think it also expresses resistance and resilience. At least, that’s how I read it.

As I went back and watched it again after seeing in the first time and knowing what will happen, the first part became imbued with even more of a sense of poignant beauty and loss. The girl looking out of an open window going past the land she will not see again for a long time, feeling the wind on her face with a sense of open air freedom that will also be lost as she becomes shut into the school (the last shot of the front of the school with doors closed is a nice juxtaposition).

Who is driving the car? One possibility is that it’s her father or grandfather. Indigenous children in Canada were required to go to residential schools as of 1920, so it’s possible a family member even drove them to the schools, though I think in some cases they were more forcibly taken away from their families.

When the film turns to show the children as zombies, on the one hand this is very fitting–the point of the residential schools was to take them away from their families so they will lose connections to their languages and cultures and take on the settler ones. In a sense, then, who the children were before is dead, and they become uniform like their uniforms, thoughtless and moving the same as the group, in the way they were taught.

And yet, I see possible hints of resistance as well…they take the opportunity when the teacher leaves the room to get out of their desks and move, get away from their school work. She sees only obedient, docile, and disciplined children; she doesn’t see that there is much more going on that they do with each other. They look up, they wake up, they dance. They hide all this again when she walks in the room, but there are things you have to hide to survive, things that you share in a community; the dance is not for her.

The turn to modern music and moves is important: while the beginning of the film takes place in the 1950s, with a song that could be much older than that, the second portion with the kids in the classroom could be happening at any time. And this combined with the modern music suggests to me a reminder that the effects of the residential school experience continue to resonate, not just through the children themselves but intergenerationally.

Regarding the solo moves by the two boys towards the end: while they are somewhat robotic, they also feel improvised and creative. The kids are standing out from the crowd, doing their own thing, expressing themselves while the others continue synchronous moves. We only see two doing this, but I get the sense that any of them could do so in turn, if there had been time before the teacher came back in.

It’s not a great sense of resistance or a great hope, and the lingering shot is of them quiet in a classroom in an imposing building that is shut up, but it’s something. I am left with a strong sense that these kids are going to make it despite the horrendous things that have happened to them.

Of course, this is just my reading, and it’s quite possible I’m missing a lot. The film doesn’t delve deeply into the horrors and abuses that happened in the system, and maybe I’m putting too positive a spin on the ending by feeling like the film expresses a sense of resistance and power in those who were subject to those abuses. I’m curious what others think.

Not perfect strangers (IndEdu200x)

a large group of people pulling on ropes to life an Indigenous pole

Raising the Reconciliation Pole at UBC Vancouver photo by Colin and Sarah Northway on Flickr, licensed CC BY 2.0

This is number four in the series of 9 posts in 9 weeks: the 9x9x25 challenge.

I am working on a UBC MOOC on Edx called Reconciliation Through Indigenous Education. We are still on week 1 and I am making my way through multiple videos and other resources.

I want to use this post to talk about two videos that struck me this week as things I wanted to reflect further on.

Susan D. Dion

We watched a video by Dr. Susan D. Dion, a Potawatami-Lenapé educational scholar, on introducing and disrupting the “perfect stranger.” I was not familiar with Dion’s work before this, but a quick web search shows that she is an Associate Professor in Education at York University who is the author of a book with UBC Press, Braiding Histories: Learning From Aboriginal Peoples’ Experiences and Perspectives (2009).

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OER and free (of cost) resources (CC Cert)

For the Creative Commons Certificate course I’m taking, one of the discussion prompts is:

Many educational resources are available to faculty and students for free or in a manner that they perceive as being free. These include resources available through library database subscriptions and most of the pages on the public internet. Many of these resources are highly engaging and some are even effective at supporting student learning. What risks are associated with adopting these resources? What is the role of these free resources in the context of efforts to create, adopt, use, and improve open educational resources? (see all assignments & discussion prompts for the course)

Here is what I wrote in the discussion board; I’m posting it here for future reference since I’m guessing that content in the course disappears into the ether after the course is finished.

I use a lot of these kinds of resources when I teach my courses in philosophy. I try to keep the costs for students as close to zero as possible, and because of the lack of OER in philosophy, most of how I do that is through resources like these. Depending on what I’m teaching, there are a number of texts that are in the public domain, but that’s only if we’re discussing things that are fairly old. Most of the other things I assign are free to read but not openly licensed (e.g., journal articles our library has subscriptions to, other academics’ website and blog posts, newspaper and magazine articles, podcasts, YouTube videos that aren’t CC licensed, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy…).

Risks and downsides of using these kinds of resources

I can think of a number of downsides, not all of them “risks” necessarily, but certainly things that aren’t as useful for teaching and learning as OER.

Risks

The one that comes to mind first is that things can disappear or change quickly. I have had it happen where I put a resource on the syllabus and then by the time we got to that point in the term the resource had either moved to a different place or disappeared. And library subscriptions aren’t stable either, given that library budgets are strained with increasing subscription costs.

Another one is kind of subtle: without careful discussion of copyright and permissions, students may get the sense that because I’m using such resources in my course, they can also use them however they want. I often ask students to consider posting some work publicly on the course blog (they can choose to do so or not, as they wish), and it’s sometimes hard going to clarify what they can post publicly and what they can’t. I think it’s very useful to have a conversation about copyright and fair dealing and how those work in educational contexts, and how they affect what students can post publicly, when using “free” resources like this.

In addition, we are in somewhat of a limbo in Canada right now with fair dealing, due to a recent court case with York University. A number of colleges and universities are now wondering just what exactly they should be doing to protect themselves against similar lawsuits related to fair dealing, where they can be liable for many millions of dollars. So there is a potential risk around using materials under fair dealing.

Downsides

These are things that I wouldn’t necessarily call risks, but are downsides to such materials.

Because these materials are not openly licensed in a way that allows for revisions, one can’t adjust them to fit one’s own context or update them oneself. One has to take the good with the bad, and what one wants along with what one doesn’t. Frequently I ask students to do things like: read sections 2.1-2.3, 2.5, 2.8-2.9…etc. It’s confusing and annoying, and it would be much easier if I could just copy the sections I want and put them together in a new document. I could do that with OER.

As noted in the modules this week, if these works aren’t openly licensed one loses another great benefit of OER: students being able to update the works themselves. Just as we see with people making suggestions about the materials in this course here (on the content documents that are open for comment), one can do that in one’s own course–students can often find new, relevant information to include, new links to include, can reword things so they’re better understandable to other students, can write new materials to add in, etc.

A downside with some library resources that may change in the future: sometimes I assign chapters from books that the library has digital copies of, which is great (students don’t have to go to the library to make a paper copy of a chapter on reserve). But the ebook platforms can be awful to read on, very cumbersome and sometimes bad on mobile (depends on the platform). It would be great if I could just post a direct PDF on my website but that’s not always allowed (depends on the particular license agreement with the publisher).

Another issue with library resources: license agreements with publishers are widely different and incredibly complicated. Our library keeps a database of such agreements and when you click on a digital resource you can find out the various permissions, but they differ depending on the particular publisher (see, e.g., Licensed Materials on this library guide for instructors). So one has to check every single digital resource from the library to see what one can do with it (can you make paper copies? Can you post a PDF? Can you only post a link? Where can you post it? etc.).

And some licenses for library materials are less permissive than exceptions to copyright. Here is a quote from the page linked to just above: “If the terms of a licence prohibit uses that would otherwise be permitted by an exception in the Copyright Act, then the terms of the licence apply.” I don’t quite get that because if there is an exception to copyright then why can the copyright holder restrict the terms like this?

Role of these resources in efforts to create, adopt, improve OER

I guess mostly what can happen is that people get confused that OER are the same as free of cost resources like these. So I think pointing out the risks and downsides are important so people can see not just the differences with OER, but why OER are better!

From others’ posts in the discussion board, as well as further thought, here are some more ideas:

Students lose access to some of the “free” resources when they finish a course or leave an institution.
Resources that are free of cost but not openly licensed may not be able to be revised in order to make them more accessible.
Free resources may not be free of cost to the institution: e.g., subscriptions to journals through the library can be very expensive, and as the costs rise then libraries have to cut the number of subscriptions they have.
Some kinds of free resources require that people sign up for accounts, so as teachers we may be requiring students to give up some of their privacy in ways that they (and we) may not fully understand.

Remixes vs Collections (CC certificate)

In the Creative Commons Certificate course I’m taking, there has been some discussion in the course slack channel about the difference between remixes and collections, in response to an assignment that asked us to create a remix (not a collection)–see my previous post for the assignment and the Story Map on Epicurus I created.

When one puts different CC licensed works together, when does one create a remix thereby, and when a collection?

Remixes/adaptations

The Creative Commons FAQ explains a “remix” as an “adaptation,” and defines an adaptation as:

An adaptation is a work based on one or more pre-existing works. What constitutes an adaptation depends on applicable law, however translating a work from one language to another or creating a film version of a novel are generally considered adaptations.

In order for an adaptation to be protected by copyright, most national laws require the creator of the adaptation to add original expression to the pre-existing work. However, there is no international standard for originality, and the definition differs depending on the jurisdiction.

Elsewhere the Creative Commons FAQ says about adaptations:

Generally, a modification rises to the level of an adaptation under copyright law when the modified work is based on the prior work but manifests sufficient new creativity to be copyrightable …

Note that an adaptation does not include redistributing a work in a new format: “Note that all CC licenses allow the user to exercise the rights permitted under the license in any format or medium.”

So just like many things in copyright law, what makes something an adaptation or remix depends on where you are, and even then it’s not necessarily 100% clear. The general idea seems to be that you are changing a work to enough of a degree that you can be said to be adding something original that can be copyrightable.

Collections

A collection, by contrast, would then seem to be using works (more or less?) unaltered and putting them together in some fashion.

Nate Angell provided a nice metaphor for the difference between remixes and collections, likening remixes to smoothies and collections to TV dinners.

Quotes from Nate’s post:

A “TV dinner” open work is when one collects separate works together and redistributes that collection, but clearly separates each work and its attribution. In this case, one is not “remixing” works, but rather curating them and offering that curation to others. Like with real TV dinners, you can still consume each ingredient by itself because they are served with clear boundaries separating each.

A “smoothie” open work is when one mixes together parts or the whole of one work with parts or wholes of other works to create a new, derivative work that includes material from many sources. Like with real smoothies, you can’t easily separate the different ingredients once they are blended together.

My lingering questions

This TV dinner vs smoothie description makes a lot of sense to me, but I wondered if one has to create a work where you can’t tell the “boundaries” between the other works in it, for it to be a remix. So, for example, if I add some arrows and text to an image, I can tell the boundaries between the original image and the text and arrows I’ve added on top of it, but I still think maybe I’m creating an adaptation or derivative work. Maybe it depends on how much I’ve added and whether those additions make the new work rise to the level of being copyrightable or not.

Let’s think about the images Nate created above as an illustration. He has taken original images and added CC license buttons to them. Are those images adaptations or collections?

Similarly, I created a few new images for the Story Map on Epicurus I created for one of the assignments in the CC certificate course. For some of them I just added circles and text to maps. For others I put several icons together into a single image. For one (showing the chronology of Socrates, Plato and Epicurus) I put three images together, added borders, and text. I am not sure if all of these are truly adaptations or not.

Question about using unaltered images in a set of slides

In the Creative Commons Certificate Slack channel I asked a few questions:

The more I think about this [the difference between remixes and collections], the more questions I have. So, for example, I thought that including an unaltered, CC licensed image in a slide show (maybe altering the size but nothing else) would mean I’m making a collection: the image (or images if there are multiple ones) plus my text plus maybe some other images. Then I could use images with licenses different from the license I gave to my slide show so long as I said “except where otherwise indicated, these slides are licensed CC BY” (e.g.).

Someone else posted in the channel that yes, that sounds right (I don’t want to quote or identify them because I haven’t asked permission!). I then continued:

But then a remix could also be considered a work where you take other works and put them together in a way that involves a degree of creativity and creation of something that could itself be copyrighted (I think), which I then think applies to my slide show because I use images in a way that they weren’t originally intended and I put them together with other images and text in a way that is copyrightable (or else how could I give it all a CC license?).

So is my slide show (as described above) a remix? And if so, can I not use, for example, CC BY SA images if I want to license the slides CC BY?

My issue here is: I could only rightfully put a CC license on my slides if they’re copyrightable, which would mean I have added enough originality to make them so. And if that’s the case, then it seems I’ve created a remix rather than a collection, and I couldn’t do the thing where I’m separating out the CC BY-SA image from the rest of the slides and license the slides overall CC BY. It seems I’d have to license them CC BY-SA.

I had an interesting conversation with someone on Slack about this, where we talked about how maybe what one is licensing with the CC BY on the whole slide deck is the stuff in between and around the CC BY-SA image. This person also noted: does it makes sense that if one remixed someone else’s image (maybe by changing the colour and adding text), then that one image must dictate the license of the whole deck of, e.g., 100 slides? This person noted that one could instead remix the image separately, post it on another site (like Flickr), license it CC BY-SA (if the original image were CC BY-SA) and say that the license for the remix was worked out before it entered the slide deck…and then again, what the CC BY on the slide deck is licensing is what else is in it besides that image.

Someone else on Slack helpfully noted that it’s useful to look at the license legal codes for complicated questions. For example, here is the legal code for CC BY-SA 4.0.

Here is what I then said on Slack, after looking at the legal code:

I found this sentence from the legal code for BY-SA particularly helpful:

“Adapted Material means material subject to Copyright and Similar Rights that is derived from or based upon the Licensed Material and in which the Licensed Material is translated, altered, arranged, transformed, or otherwise modified in a manner requiring permission under the Copyright and Similar Rights held by the Licensor.”

So, if I’m just using the “licensed material” (e.g., the original image) as is and not translating it, altering it, transforming it, or otherwise modifying it then I can put it into my slide show just as it is and say it’s licensed CC BY-SA even though my overall slides are licensed CC BY.

So I think I figured out the answer to my question about a slide show. But I am still not certain about how much adapting is needed for something to rise to a full adaptation/remix!

Story Map on Epicurus (CC Certificate)

For the Creative Commons Certificate course I’m taking, one of the assignments is to create a remix:

Create a remix in any medium (e.g., photo, video, audio) for use in a course you teach. If you aren’t currently teaching a course, create a remix for use in a future offering of the CC Certification course. Your remix must meet the following criteria:

be comprised of at least five (5) pre-existing CC licensed works,

contain appropriate attribution for each component work (remember to think TASL!), and

be a legal remix (that is, the licenses of all component works must be compatible).

You are welcome to include your own original work in the remix but this is not required. Be sure to create a remix and not merely a collection. (CC Certificate course resources)

The question of what counts as a remix vs a collection is actually fairly complicated. See my next post on remixes vs collections for more.

I decided to try a Story Map for this assignment, and focused it on a philosopher I often teach in my Introduction to Philosophy course, Epicurus. We discuss Epicurus’ views on happiness and why we shouldn’t fear death, but to best understand those views it’s helpful to have some background information on him and some of his other arguments. I have been meaning to create a video to allows students to get that background information outside of class, but my experience creating course videos in the past has shown that it takes a lot of time to make them. And I thought…why not use this CC Certificate assignment to provide the information another way?

I am pretty sure I heard of Story Maps through this CC Certificate course itself, and I wanted to try it out. It was still a fair bit of work, but didn’t take nearly as much time as a video usually takes for me. The interface was really easy and intuitive to use, and made providing attributions for other works used in it fairly easy as well.

I just wish they had set it up so one could choose a CC license for the work and have the right machine-readable data associated, so it could easily be found through a search for CC licensed works. I have submitted that request to them on a survey they provided asking for feedback.

Otherwise, I’m quite happy with the result overall!

The Story Map is embedded below, but because this site isn’t full width (it has a sidebar), things don’t look as good in the embed as they would if it were full width (e.g., the black boxes of text that move up over some of the images are not supposed to be in the middle, they’re supposed to be on the side).

It’s better to go to the original link: Story Map on Epicurus: History, Epistemology, Physics

CC Licenses by the numbers

This is Assignment 3 for the Creative Commons Certificate course I’m taking:

Create a video, slide presentation, or infographic (or choose another medium) in which you describe the Creative Commons licenses as well as how and when they might be useful to your institutions’ work. At a minimum, include a description of:

the three layers of the CC licenses,

the four license elements and the icons that represent them (Links to an external site.)

the six Creative Commons licenses,

how the CC licenses affect exceptions and limitations to copyright, and

how the CC licenses affect works in the public domain.

— See all the assignments in the course here.

This one was challenging to fit on an infographic–it’s got more words than I would like to include. I wanted to come up with some unifying theme and decided on “by the numbers,” which works best for the first three sections; the last one is a little bit pushing it into the numbers theme!

I used canva.com to make it, and a template that had approximately these colours (though I had to change them a bit to make them fit web accessibility standards).

Explaining CC BY-NC and BY-SA

For the Creative Commons Certificate course I’m taking right now, our discussion question this week was [there is a publicly viewable doc with all the discussion questions and assignments for the course]:

Both the NonCommercial restriction of the Creative Commons licenses and the ShareAlike condition of the licenses are poorly understood by novice CC users – and even some long-time users. How would explain the issues with NC to a person choosing to use a CC license for the first time? How would you explain the way SA works to a person choosing to use a CC license for the first time?

I wrote a quite long reply, which I’m copying here for possible future reference!

I started thinking about the issues and questions with these two elements of CC licenses about 5 years ago, when I was really starting to dig into OER and open licenses. I was taking a course from the Open University on open education, and we were asked to choose a CC license for the works we create. I decided on CC BY and explained why I hadn’t chosen NC in one blog post, and why not SA in another blog post. Re-reading these, I find the thoughts there still resonate with me. But asking people new to these ideas to read through two long posts would be too much!

To explain NC and SA to someone new, and some of the possible issues with one or both, I’d say something like the following. I’m going to assume I’m speaking to either a post-secondary instructor, student, or staff member, since that’s the context in which I am most often speaking about Creative Commons.

NonCommercial

Say you find a resource that has a CC BY-NC license. This means that it cannot be used for a “commercial” purpose. According to the terms of this license:

“NonCommercial means not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation.”

What’s important here is the use of the resource, not who or what organization is using it. Regardless of whether it’s a teacher, a student, someone in a government, or a for-profit corporation, the question is the same: is the intended use primarily for monetary compensation? If so, then the resource can’t be used. If not, then it can be used, even by the corporation.

Lack of clarity

Note that whether something counts as a commercial use isn’t always easy to determine, including in an educational context. Just because we work or study at a university doesn’t mean we are exempted from the NC restriction. This means that if an instructor wanted to assign a resource licensed CC BY-NC for a class, and put it into a course pack that the bookstore copied and charged students for, this could go against the NC license: if there is a charge beyond just cost recovery for copying (e.g., a bookstore markup), then this would be a violation of the NC part of the license.

There are other difficult cases in the educational context, where it’s unclear if a use would count as commercial or not. What if a post-secondary institution created a MOOC that was available free of charge but students could sign up for a certificate, in which case they’d have to pay? Can the MOOC use content licensed CC BY-NC? I have sometimes gotten honoraria to give presentations and workshops at various institutions; would it be a violation if I used content licensed CC BY-NC in my slides? We could probably find answers to these questions, but the point I’m making is that determining whether a use is primarily for “commercial advantage” or “monetary compensation” is sometimes murky, and even if we find answers to some test cases, others will pop up.

The result of this is that material licensed with NC simply may be used less often by well-meaning, conscientious people who legitimately wonder about whether their particular use would violate the license. (Of course, neither NC nor all rights reserved will stop the non-well-meaning people!).

What’s your goal?

When choosing a license for one’s own work, one should consider the what one’s goals are. If the goal is to share the work so that it is used widely, then perhaps NC isn’t the best. As one of the other students in this course has pointed out in the discussion board, if someone could take what you’ve created and make it even better by making an interactive resource (for example), but they need to make some money in order to pay for the system and labour their using to do it, doesn’t it seem to make sense that they could be compensated for that? And the resource gets even more used than it might otherwise. So if widespread use is one’s main goal, others using the work and adding more to it, even if they charge some money, still fulfills that goal.

Also in the discussion board for this course, someone pointed to a 2016 blog post by David Wiley called “Advocating for CC BY” that raises an important point I hadn’t considered before: all of the CC licenses require attribution (CC0 does not, but it’s not a license), and the attribution must include a link to the original work plus a notice of the CC license. You can also specify how you want to be attributed, and in that specification you could require that people say that “this resource is available for free at … [give a website]”. This could serve a similar purpose to NC: it could mean that those who want to make a profit just off the resource itself couldn’t do so because they’d have to say the resource is free elsewhere. Of course, if they’re adding value to the resource somehow people might still be willing to pay for that, but again, if they’re adding value then it seems legitimate for them to ask people to pay for that value. And if people only want the resource then they can get it for free at the download link.

ShareAlike

If one is still worried about others possibly using their resources for free and then adding something to them to make money, they could consider a “share alike” license, such as CC BY-SA. This requires that if anyone creates a derivative using a work licensed with an SA element, the new work has to be licensed with the same license (or an equivalent license) as the original. This is a good license to use if one’s goal is not only to have one’s work widely used, but also if one wants to ensure that derivative, downstream works continue to be able to be used and adapted without cost. If one used CC BY for one’s work then it could be enclosed by someone else into another work that is put behind a paywall and has all rights reserved, and so is neither easily accessible nor able to be revised without express permission.

Harder to make money (but not impossible)

Let’s say one created a resource, licensed it CC BY-SA, and someone else took that resource and made it into an interactive one, to stick with the same example as above. The new work must also be licensed CC BY-SA. In this case, then, it’s harder for the second person to charge money for the work. They could do so, but someone else could just come along, download it, and put it up somewhere else with the same license and legally that would be fine.

So SA can make it harder to make money from a derivative work. But SA is not the same as NC, and one can make money by using works licensed CC BY-SA. The share alike clause only applies if one makes a derivative. But let’s say one uses an image licensed CC BY-SA in an online course that people have to pay to register for. If the image is used as is, not altered at all, then this is legally permissible (I think! Please someone correct me if I’m wrong!). Similarly, if you create a video and license it CC BY-SA, then someone else could use the video in its entirety, intact, in such an online course that costs money to take.

Remix restrictions

SA is not without issues, though; such works are less easily remixed with other works than, say, those with CC BY licenses. One has to worry more about license compatibility when putting together two or more works that have either NC or SA restrictions, as explained on this license compatibility chart.

What’s your goal? (redux)

So again, if wide usability is one’s goal, then perhaps simply CC BY (or CC0) is the best bet for one’s own work.

If one’s overriding concern is to share work free of cost and ensure that others can’t use it in a way that makes them money, then NC is probably better than SA. But it will likely be less widely used, as noted above, because of the lack of clarity (SA is clearer in that one can easily fulfill it by using the same CC license on a derivative as on the original work).

If one’s main goal is to share work and ensure that later derivatives continue to be available for free and have derivatives made from them, then CC BY-SA is the better license.

How Creative Common licenses are linked to copyright

For the Creative Commons Certificate course I’m taking right now, one of the discussion topics for this week was:

In many ways, Creative Commons licenses feel like an alternative to copyright law. But the truth is that Creative Commons licenses only work because copyright law exists.

How would you explain the relationship between Creative Commons and copyright law to someone new to Creative Commons? What kinds of examples would you use?

Since my response will probably disappear into the ether after the course ends, and since it might actually be useful for me to think about and revise later, I decided to post it here (with a couple of additions made after I already posted to the discussion board).

If I were to explain the relationship between copyright law and Creative Commons to someone new to CC, say, if they were a faculty member at a post-secondary institution (like I am), I might start by using examples of creating research articles or book chapters.

When you write a research article or book chapter, you hold copyright in that work as soon as it is set into a tangible medium (such as a digital file on a computer). You can choose to copy that work how you wish, to post it on a website, to send it to colleagues via email, to make a poster with some of the same images/figures, to translate the work into another language, to try to sell it to someone else, and more. Others cannot do these things because they don’t have the same rights you do; they don’t hold the copyright, and if they want to do things like this they have to ask your permission.

But if you then work with a publisher of a journal or a manuscript, depending on the publisher and the context, you may have to give away some (or most) of the rights to be able to do these things. You may not be able to post your on a website, to make as many copies as you wish and give them all way, to create a translation, to use the charts/figures in another work, to try to sell it to someone else. It is now the publisher who owns the copyright in the work (or at least many of the aspects of your copyright rights). I once tried to post a pre-print of a book chapter I wrote in an institutional repository, and discovered that the contract I signed didn’t allow me to do that.

When you give your work a Creative Commons license it’s not like this; you retain copyright and the rights associated with it. If you apply a CC license to your work what this does is signal to others how they can use it even without asking your permission. But you still have the same copyright rights you would otherwise.

Often if you publish in an open access journal you retain your copyright and give your work a CC license that allows the journal to post the work on their site, allows readers to download the work to their computers, to print it out, and, depending on the CC license, to use the work for commercial purposes or to make derivatives like translations. CC licenses don’t replace or take away copyright, they work on top of it, making it easy for creators to signal to others what they may do with the work without asking permission.

Consider what this can mean in the context of teaching and learning. Say you want to assign a 2 or 3 of chapters of a book for a course. Students won’t be needing the whole thing, but if you want to go beyond what “fair dealing” might allow, and it’s not a book the library has (or there is only one physical copy), then you either have to ask students to purchase the whole book even though they’ll only use part of it, or look for some other resource for your course. Fair dealing in Canada is quite complicated, actually, and not always easy to figure out. In addition, sometimes electronic copies of resources are purchased through the library with licenses that override what fair dealing might otherwise allow, so things are even more complicated!

If that book were CC licensed (which some are!), you could post on a course website or physically copy just the chapters you need for your students, without asking permission from the author or the publisher. And the author still has the rights to do other things with the work, like post it in multiple websites or repositories, or translate it (or ask others to do so).

This brings up an important point, though: if you are able to use a work under fair dealing, any CC license does not alter your ability to do so. CC licenses work within the structure of copyright, so whatever you could do under copyright law, you can still do with a CC licensed work. Where using CC licensed works in courses can be useful is that you can go beyond what is allowed under fair dealing, and in some cases (depending on the license) you can also adapt the works to your own course & context, by taking out some parts, adding in images, and more.