Two more mad weeks have passed. Knowing what I get out of this course is directly linked to the amount of effort and time invested, I’m really trying to find the time to do the course justice…

The topic at hand this time is “Open Learning – Sharing and Openness”. A topic in which we covered, among other things, creative commons, open education and MOOCs. My top moment was watching David Wiley’s TED-talk on Open Education and the Future and hearing him telling his audience (us) to stop acting like selfish children – “If there is no sharing there is no education”. He points out that expertise is nonrivalrous – it can be given without being given away – and questions why rather than sharing with others many act like the seagulls in Finding Nemo (https://youtu.be/H4BNbHBcnDI) and say “mine, mine, mine”. David Wiley believes that education is on the verge of reformation and I think he might be right. Just looking at my own job and what I do today compared to what I did eight years ago so much has happened and by no means have we seen the end of it. I create a lot of video lectures and other online material for my Swedish courses and I am by no means opposed to sharing it with others. I am not afraid of becoming superfluous when sharing. Instead I believe the teacher to be more important than ever. The students need someone to guide them through the vast amounts of material out there and they need feedback on their output. Sharing is no threat to me as a teacher. However, I am still reluctant to share as it is a jungle out there when it comes to copyright. It is hard to know what you can and can’t do when it comes to sharing and referencing other people’s material. As long as my material stays on campus and/or in the University’s closed digital learning platform, I think it is ok if I am not fully up to date with copyright laws. But if you start sharing, that has to change…

That brings me to Creative Commons. Maybe I should not admit this but two weeks ago I had this vague idea that images licensed under Creative Commons were free to use. They are but it is not as easy as that… At the very least the creator needs to be attributed. According to Foter.com 90 percent of Creative Common photos are not attributed at all (“How To Attribute Creative Commons Photos” by Foter. Surely studying “sharing and openness” is a golden opportunity to learn more about Creative Commons and gain the confidence I so surely lacked. Ok, so what have I learned? Well, I have learned that Public Domain material is great. No attribution is needed. The drawback is that most of the Public Domain images are old. I have also learned that even though media licensed as Creative Commons is free to use, attribution is a must. For a photo, an ideal attribution includes the name of the photo, the name of the creator and the license deed as well as links to the source, creator and license deed. There is more – there are six different Creative Common licenses. For example, an image can be free to use as long as you don’t alter it in any way or use it for commercial purposes or you might be able to remix, tweak and build upon an image as long as you license your new creation under identical terms. The licenses range from most free where you can “distribute, remix, tweak and build upon the original work, even commercially, as long as you credit the original creator” to least free where you cannot change the original work in any way or use it commercially (“How To Attribute Creative Commons Photos” by Foter. Flickr and Wikimedia Commons are good places to look for media licensed under Creative Commons.

I use what others have created all the time in my teaching, so I want to finish off by saying how grateful I am to all of you out there who share your material. I also hope that what I create and share will be of use to others. Together we can create something that is greater than the sum of the parts…