It's Friday... My least favourite day to work and most favourite day to find other things to do. So I am blogging. WOW!!! That statement in itself shows how much I have evolved in the last 5 weeks. Never once did I ever think I would be blogging about anything, or sharing my thoughts with all of you people. This course has really changed a lot about how I value my thoughts and seem to have a need to share them now. Thanks Alec Couros for this cool opportunity. I might even take blogging up as a hobby moving forward! Looking back at what I didn't know before this course and all I have learned through research and my cohort, I think I am actually leaving with more questions than answers but with an awareness of a ton of resources at my fingertips. Not only am I overly careful now about how and when I can use materials, I know more about how to share mine. No, I don't understand all the copyright laws. I am not a lawyer, just a teacher that wants to give credit where credit is due. Now I have some additional tools to do this. If you are still unsure of how exactly to share your cool ideas (outside of blogging) here is a little video on how you can participate.
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Richard Prince is a contemporary artist in the united states that make a fortune off other peoples work. Since the early 70's, he has been "transforming" other peoples images and selling them for profit. In 1975, he recreated a photo of a cowboy that sold for over a million dollars! What? How is this ok? He has been in in headlines this week because of his showcase in the Frieze Art Gallery in London. Prince found all of his images on Instagram, blew them up to a larger format, and sold them. Some for over $100,000. This was investigated and found to be completely legal. Why? Prince "modified" the images by adding text and emojis underneath the photos. That's all. It was ruled fair and not any kind of copyright infringement. Apparently, there are no laws on how much you have to change an image for it to be considered your own work. This is very different from the music industry! If your song sounds at all like another song, or even uses a similar rif, you will get sued! Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke were sued by the family of Marven Gaye for reportedly $7.3 million dollars for the song Blurred Lines. That is only one example of many! How can these two industries be so different. I view them both as art and think they should be treated the same. Artists need to have original work in order to profit from it. If it is not yours, it is not yours to profit from. I don't completely disagree with what Prince did as I think those beautiful photos should be showcased, but I think that the true artists need to be credited and compensated... at least a portion of the profits should go to the actual photographers. The owners of those photos will never see a dime for their beautiful work. Take a look at this news cast and let me know your thoughts. Here is a good article the @courosa tweeted as well:
A reminder that your Instagram photos aren’t really yours: Someone else can sell them for $90,000 To be honest, it's not just blogging. I hate to participate, I hate to share, I hardly even call, tweet, or facebook. I have never been a self involved person and I hold my friends and family very dear to my heart. So what is it that makes me HATE to share so much? I have always chalked it up to (and actually said this to my husband yesterday) being very surface. I don't really want to go deep. I don't want to let people in. Why would anyone but my husband really care what I think, and most of the time HE isn't even listening (especially if there are sports on the TV) I have been through years of university then endless staff meetings with saying nothing at all. "Who cares what That Girl (me) has to say", "What does she know?" It took 1 minute and 54 seconds at 7:12 this morning to completely change my perception. I watched this video What? My mom always said I march to the sound of my own drummer. I thought this meant I was crazy...maybe I am, but this totally means I have unique ideas. Maybe it is time to start to share them? https://www.flickr.com/photos/97411961@N00/14074557730/ I always thought of myself as technologically savvy. I am great with computers (for a lay person), I type quickly, I work online, and although I didn't participate in twitter or instagram, I thought I knew what was out there and just chose not to use it.
Then I signed up for OLTD. This week in OLTD 505, the topic was "Making Learning Visible" and we were given a list of readings, videos, etc. to sift through and do some self directed learning. I started with these two websites: Educational Hashtags The 50+ Best Ways to Curate and Share Your Favorite Social Media and News Content This first one is pretty self explanatory. It is an exhaustive list of hashtags used in the educational field. To be honest, I still haven't scrolled all the way to the bottom. Where would I ever start? I never knew there was so many ways to keep connected JUST on twitter! Being that I am brand new to twitter.. this one was a bit over my head and overwhelming. I thought for sure I would be more comfortable with the second link. It was a list of all the different and best ways to share! Since I have been in this program, I have added countless ways to get my materials and ideas out there. I have learned how to use Weebly, Twitter, Picotchart, Prezi, Google forms and docs, among many others. After I started scrolling though the 50+ tools, I recognized... get this...ZERO. Really?? None? I am feeling super lost and overwhelmed with everything out there. Coming in to this as confident as I did, I am now feeling somewhat defeated. I really think that this could be why teachers have been so stuck in their old school (pardon the pun) ways. With the vastness of everything that is out there, where do they start? Not only that, many teachers are really not that great with computers. With the new generation of teachers coming this may change but will they be "old school" in time too? I understand that as a teacher Professional Development is required, but how many teachers do you know that actively participate then bring the new ideas into their classrooms? Many are afraid to use technology as they are afraid to fail. I am not saying this is all teachers. I am in a cohort of teachers right now that are trying to get ahead of the pack and learn, but what percentage of teachers are not? How do we help them overcome their fears when the vastness of options overwhelms?
As a teacher, OER’s seem so justifiable and important. We all work under a budget and we all want the best for the kids. When I was teaching, I used and shared many different types of materials and even pulled many activities from free sites online. Searching through all the different OER’s this week, I found that there are so many great, high quality materials to choose from. Most of which are easy to navigate, many have user reviews to help sift through the good and the junk, and the best part… they are free! Some examples are:
WikiEducator OpenStax CNX JORUM MERLOT II OER Commons To be very honest, I am really embarrassed that I did not know about these back when I was a teacher in a regular brick and mortar classroom. Why aren't teachers talking about these resources? More importantly, why isn't administration pushing their use? It would save schools so much of their money if we could all use FREE resources. Then more of the very tight budget can go to technology, health sciences and field trips. HOWEVER>>>>
I am extremely torn in how I really feel about these free and widely available resources. I work for a great company that produces and sells high quality educational materials. I absolutely LOVE my job and if such great products are out there and free... am I at risk? Our company is teacher owned and operated and we operate on low cost for high quality but its not free!!! If OER's are so widely available, what would schools need us for?
Please chime in! I would love any input from teachers out there. Especially any that have used our courses. Humans: We all have natural given gifts and painfully obvious weaknesses. I am admittedly not a good writer but I am great at problem solving! I do not pay close attention to details (unless it benefits me) but I am extremely organized! What are your strengths? What do you contribute when given the chance? If we were all the same the world would be very boring! Because we all have some things we are great at and other items that we could improve on, working collaboratively on projects is always a great idea. People will see things you don’t and maybe even do something better then you, so together, you might create something totally awesome! There is only one problem with the whole process… what is in your brain is rightfully yours based on copyright laws. No one can use any of your ideas without your permission. Ok, well I guess that puts an end to my idea. Move on. Work by yourself. Wait! What if there was a way to put your work out there and share what you know with the world and actually GIVE people permission to use it and even make it better! Its called "Creative Commons" and I am learning that it is an awesome way to get free materials or share your own files. Watch this little video for a bit more of an explanation - What is Creative Commons? You can also read more about it here http://creativecommons.org/about Creative Commons so not replace copyright laws, they merely give you the tools to easily modify the law to best suit your own needs when it comes to your work. If you want to give permission for others to use your work, there is a very simple formula to decide which "symbols" to attach to your work. That formula is found here http://creativecommons.org/choose/ and looks like this: Easy right? If you haven't already, why not get on board and share! Go ahead and browse around, you might find something you want to use. If you already use creative commons, what do you use it for? The most common places to find creative commons are: http://search.creativecommons.org http://creativecommons.ca https://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/ https://500px.com/creativecommons Do you know anymore? I am very new to this idea of free sharing online but am excited to start exploring possible resources that I could use in my life. How do we share if we are not wired in?This whole "sharing of information" thing really got me thinking. What if there was no internet. How could we share our files with other people? Back in university, I remember having to burn my presentations onto a disk in order to share it with my class. Later on, we would put our work onto USB sticks and pass them around. Just until last year, I was still using the USB method with other teachers as we would share our lesson files with each other. I started searching the internet and came across a grand project called "Dead Drops" that I am absolutely fascinated with. It is a completely wireless file sharing project that involves a USB and a little cement. Watch this: I don't know why this fascinated me so much. I think it might just be the idea of plugging in and seeing what you might find on one of these dead drops! I did a bit more research and found that this project is not only in New York City, it is all over the globe I am totally inspired to bring a dead drop to my own city of Edmonton just to see what people might share. If I do, I will be sure to take pictures and document where it is so you can come down and see it too:)
Are you inspired? I wrote a blog earlier this week about the Ted Talk by Lawrence Lessing called Laws that Choke Creativity. He touched on so many great points about how we produce for the love of it, we recreate, we are a read-only culture, and about how copyright laws do get in the way of creativity. In my blog, I touched on many of his key points and agreed with a lot of them, especially where he said we need to legalize what it means to be young. But I am not posting that blog today. After doing a bit of research into OER’s this week and resonating on a story that Lawrence told I just am no longer settled with this whole idea. Don’t get me wrong! As an educator, I am all about sharing resources and putting it all out there. I am just uncertain about how this is going to work. Lawrence told a story about broadcasting. He said that there was a company called ASCAP that owned all the rights to all of the best material so they could charge whatever they liked. After years of this, a company called BMI was created that gave their subscribers free music, although it was not the best music. In the end, BMI took over. People went to the next best thing because it was free and available. As a SIRIUS/XM subscriber I was very unsettled with this thought. Why am I paying for something that is free? It’s simple. It’s a better product. I have more channels, no commercials, instant streaming from all my devices and more. People will pay for a better product if at all possible. We want what is best and were willing to spend our hard earned dollar to get it! The owners of sirius/xm saw potential to make money and they took it. This is the human factor that is weighing on me. People are full of greed. They want more and more! If they can make a profit they will. Why give it away? Are educators different? Are we more inclined to share? Will we use the second best material because it’s free or will the best materials become free with this movement to OER’s? So many questions are swirling in my mind after this week of discovery. Hopefully some of them will get answers in the next week. |