Teaching & Learning, and SoTL, in Philosophy
I was invited to give a workshop at the Student Union Development Summit at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, August 19, 2018.
I was asked to talk about open educational resources and student advocacy. Here are the slides for the workshop, in downloadable, editable Power Point format: OER & advocacy on Campus (SUDS 2018) (.pptx)
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.
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.
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!).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the Creative Commons Certificate Course for Educators I’m taking at the moment, our assignment for Unit 2 (on copyright law) was to create something that provides the basics of copyright. One option was:
Create a video, slide presentation, or infographic (or choose another medium) in which you describe the basics of copyright law as covered in Module 2. Make an effort to create something that would be useful and interesting to someone else.
At a minimum, include descriptions of:
- the purpose of copyright,
- what is copyrightable and what is not,
- the relationship between copyright and other methods of protecting intellectual property,
- how a person receives copyright protection for their work,
- the public domain, and
- exemptions to copyright like fair use.
The instructions for all assignments in this course are publicly available.
For the Unit 1 assignment I made an infographic, but this time there was just too much information to include in a small space. So I decided to do some kind of presentation.
The conceptual structure I chose (a series of questions: what, who, why, when, when not) called out for a Prezi, because then I could include the information within each heading/question really easily. But then I discovered that Prezi is not accessible (at least, Prezi Next is not).
So I went with the tried and true Power Point. As with my previous assignment, I spent a lot of time ensuring adequate colour contrast for accessibility. I didn’t add alt text to the icons except in one place, because the icons are for decorative purposes; I ensured that (nearly) all required information is in the text (the one place where the icon added more, I added alt text).
This was a bit challenging because usually when I make slides I do so for a talk/presentation/workshop, and that means I’ll be speaking while showing them so I can give information orally. Here I had to include all information on the slides themselves because they are serving a standalone purpose. Hence, there is more text on these slides than I usually include!
You can see the slides on Speakerdeck, and download them in Power Point format for editing on the Open Science Framework.
In May of 2018 I facilitated a two-day workshop at Davidson College, in Davidson, North Carolina, on Open Educational Practices. I created a site for the workshop on my domain (I have a domain with Reclaim Hosting) where I posted the schedule, learning objectives, and all resources.
Go to that site to see everything; if you just want to see the slides, see below! The slides are available in an editable, power point format on the resources page on the website for the workshop.
[I can’t see the embedded slides on my version of Firefox with Privacy Badger enabled. If you can’t see the embedded slides, there may be an add-on issue. You could try a different browser or turn off a privacy add on. Or you can use the links to see the slides.]
See the Day 1 slides on Speakerdeck
See the Day 2 slides on Speakerdeck
I am taking the Creative Commons Certificate course for Educators this summer, and the assignment for the end of the first week is this (this is one of the two options):
Create a video, slide presentation, podcast, wikibook content, an infographic (or choose another medium) in which you describe the key historical events leading up to the launch of Creative Commons and the state of Creative Commons today. Rather than a disconnected list, create a narrative (tell a story) that ties events and people together. Try to create something that would be useful and interesting to someone who just heard about Creative Commons and wants to learn more.
There was also a list of elements of the story that need to be included, and I just barely managed to fit all of them on the infographic I created! (You can see all of the documents for the course, including the assignments, on the Certificate Resources page.)
I made it with Canva, and most of the icons were purchased through a subscription to The Noun Project. Besides trying to make the elements look good visually and be readable, the thing that took me a surprisingly long time was working on the colour contrasts on the infographic to try to conform to web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) for colour contrast. The default colours on the template I used from Canva did not conform to those guidelines.
I used the WebAIM colour contrast checker to play around with the background colours and the text/icon colours to make the contrast fit WCAG 2.0 AA guidelines. I am not certain I 100% succeeded; it was a laborious process with Canva, to find the hex codes for each colour and input them into the contrast checker. I just made the decision not to make the dotted lines under the years conform to the guidelines; it’s not a problem if those are difficult to see, as they don’t convey any meaning but are merely decorative.
When will we get to the point where templates on tools such as Canva just automatically conform to accessibility guidelines, or at least automatically have a checker that can help you test if they do and fix if they do not?
Overall, this took quite a bit of time this week, and if I took even more time I expect I’d be happier with it, but at some point one has to stop and move on to the next task!
As noted in the previous post, I helped facilitate an open online course called OOE13 (Open Online Experience 13) in 2013 and 2014. In April 2014 I was in charge of the topic of open education for the course, and we had a couple of Twitter chats. This was actually the first one though it is coming second here in my post order.
I’m archiving the tweets here because Storify is going away in a few days. So think of this post as having been here since 2014.
From Sept. 2013 to May 2014 I helped co-design and facilitate an open, online course for educators (Open Online Experience 2013) on topics ranging from connected learning to digital literacy to digital storytelling to open education. The domain we had is no longer kept up and has some other website on it, so you can’t get information there. But you can see a couple of other posts about it under the OOE13 category here on my blog.
In this post and the next one I’ll be pasting in Tweets from Twitter chats we had in April of 2014, when I was in charge of that month’s topic, open education. Now that storify.com is going away, I need to archive what I had there, here on my blog!
On August 29, 2014, I helped facilitate a Twitter chat for a course I was co-designing and facilitating called Why Open? at P2PU (Peer 2 Peer University).
I had this Twitter chat archived at storify.com, but since it’s going away I’m moving the Tweets here to my blog instead. So imagine that this post was made in 2014!
I took out some tweets whose URLs went nowhere; apparently they have left Twitter or moved their accounts…
I participated in #CLMOOC (connected learning MOOC) in the summer of 2016, at least a little bit (see a couple of posts in the CLMOOC category here on my blog).
I created a “Find 5 Friday” post on Storify during that time, and as Storify is shutting its doors and deleting all content in a week or so (May 2018) I’m archiving important stories from there, here on my blog.
So, this is from July 2016….
http://clmooc.com/2016/make-cycle-1-make-with-me-who-are-we/
Nazife posted in the #clmooc Google plus group a couple of lines from Rumi:
“Why do you stay in prison
When the door is so wide open?”
If you click on the link to the G+ post above you can see the very apt image she posted, with these lines superimposed on it.
I found this very thought-provoking, and wondered what prisons I am staying in, even without realizing it. That is a theme for my #F5F (of which one is the Nazife’s post!). Some of the prisons I’m in are based in fear, so the following are ways I got past that this week.
Terry Elliott wrote a post in which he claims he “stole” a poem from Deanna Mascle and made something new from it.
He asked on his Google Plus post about this post, “We are collaborating with our #DailyConnect , but…what if the collaboration is unbidden.” He didn’t ask, he just took the original and made something new.
That’s something I’ve very familiar with from #ds106–taking what someone else has created, even without asking, and making something else. It’s part of the culture of sharing and making there. So this wasn’t surprising to me.
And what was really cool is that Deanna had made her original picture from words she collected from others in CLMOOC. Talk about collaboration!
Deanna’s also a great post on its own, putting together many people’s contributions to week 1!
It’s a great example of showcasing what others have done and doing something wonderful with it.
http://metawriting.deannamascle.com/notable-notes-exploring-identity-within-clmooc/
What was surprising to me was that even though at the end of his post above Terry invited us explicitly to collaborate on his own poem made from Deanna’s picture, I was really wary about doing so. Here is the Hackpad he invited us to play on.
I did add some things and created a section of the pad that could stand on its own as a poem, but I left the rest of what he had written at the bottom, as if afraid to touch it. As if I shouldn’t really mess with it. Sure, it was partly to leave it in case others wanted to use that part and make something new, but really it was because I felt very awkward taking someone else’s words and changing them.
And that’s strange to me because I do it all the time with pictures in #ds106, but somehow with writing it felt different. The words felt like they were more attached to the person and I shouldn’t mess with them. Even when Terry explicitly said to do so!
But I got over that and did it anyway, at least to some degree. So I got out of that “prison,” so to speak.
Karen LaBonte wrote in her week 1 reflection that she has often started off strong in MOOCs but then:
“typically, within a couple of of weeks, I am floundering in the backwash of folks who seem to instinctively know the who, what, where, when, and why: who to talk to, when, what to say, what they want to gain from the experience, what they can offer others, etc. As I teetered on the cusp of CLMOOC2016, I wondered whether MOOCs are made for extroverts, which in many ways, I am not.”
I found this really important to consider. I am an extrovert online, someone who puts herself out there in many ways and hopes for the best. This week I shared my very personal grief over some of the horror that has been happening in the world this summer, as I struggled with my emotions on one of the days this week and decided to do a drawing to try to express them. I was a little worried about sharing that pain and that drawing with strangers, but I decided to try and got wonderful support back (and even Daniel Bassill making a remix of my drawing, which helped me immensely).
I appreciated the reminder that some people find open, online courses difficult and can get lost in the flow, feel somewhat left out when others seem to know exactly what to do. What I can say, though, is that so far I am finding CLMOOC to be a very inviting space and I hope that people who might otherwise flounder a bit can find their footing here in this kind, supportive, open and fun group!
I also loved Karen’s stories about the unexpected smiles she shared one day, one through Pokemon Go and one just from someone on the street who wished her a good day out of the blue. Knowing that that still happens, and there are wonderful people in the world, was something I needed to hear this week.
One of the #dailyconnects for week 1 was to explore one’s edge.
What is your edge and how do you approach falling off? That resonated with the theme I’ve chosen for my #F5F this week, of what prisons I find myself in based in fear.
Sheri Edwards created a lovely picture in which she explores her own edge.
Sheri talks about going over the edge of shyness, and realizing that when you fall off, that is when you can fly. And grow, and change.
One of my edges currently is with drawing. It’s something I’ve always thought I just couldn’t do, even while others could. Recently I decided to, well, just start and practice–because how can you get good if you never do it? That’s one of my edges I’ll be pushing in #clmooc this summer, and I’m glad to have a supportive and kind bunch of people to push it with!
