Blog Post #3  / Open Content & Ethics

            I will start this blog post off by letting everyone know I have been called a “Copyright Nazi” throughout earlier parts of my life.  I’ve always been the one bringing awareness to intellectual property laws and issues of compliance.  As many of us aspiring Instructional Designers work our talents putting together lessons, it becomes much and much less known who really owns the content we are creating and whom owns some of the materials we are placing into our creation.  As designers and educators using these materials we need to know ownership rights and reference those who rightly need to be recognized. 

            Open content is a fantastic opportunity.  Both for the author and the educator using the materials with focus on certain objectives better the educational experience through these lessons is a great idea.  The teacher does not need to start from scratch and has a template to success as they provide content for their students to absorb.  Prior to these readings I had not been in contact with Creative Commons.   It is a great way to access and distribute content without coming into conflict with the laws that protect content creators.  Open content allows the instructor and student to find new works, evaluate them, and make use of the materials themselves. (Johnson, Adams, & Haywood 2011)  For content designers it provides a great framework to work under for distribution of work for use in instructional application.  One would think that providing content such as this for instructional use would be a simple straight forward process but that is not normally the case. Extensive protocols need to be followed to properly provide content to the outside world.

            The section of the readings on electronic texts is extremely relevant in today’s society.    As stated above the model in which publishing and distributing content was pretty restrictive.  Digital Rights Management (DRM) issues also made it difficult to use electronically distributed works in an instructional setting. (Johnson, Adams, & Haywood 2011)  With the change taking place in academic and social cultures these barriers are becoming less a barrier to using materials in forming ideas.  Educational activity is adapting to cultural changes.  “Publishers are beginning to explore richly visual interfaces that include multimedia and collaborative elements.” (Johnson, Smith, Willis, Levine, & Haywood 2011)  More multimedia materials are being used to engage the learner into a more rich learning experience.  This concept is still rather new in today’s learning environment and the use of electronic readers, though a numerous studies have been done, is still in its infancy. 

Ethics become very gray when applied to the classroom.  Teachers use licensed materials for their classes but many stray away from traditional methods in order to better engage with their technology driven younger generation student.  Teaching by blanket rule falls into the fair use category when utilizing media.

So where are the areas of concentration that should concern us as educational consumers and producers of open educational materials?

-          CHANGE  -  Changing and altering of any materials degrades the intended lesson plan.  Whether it’s a few lines or an entire lesson, altering the path also alters the objective intended by the creator of the piece.  The author’s intended message therefore is altered and interferes with the piece of instruction.

-          WHO POLICES IT?  -  We live in a society that openly embraces free and open information.  People misinterpret and redefine barriers all the time.  So who is out there to police the desecration of an author’s method or misguided results of a teacher changing the content to fit their message and not the creator of the copyrighted objective?  I question school awareness in this regard.

-          LICENSING – While many educators go through proper channels and follow procedures many do not.  Failure to follow licensing codes is a large ethical concern. 

Licensing Deeds such as the ones used by Creative Commons alleviates this problem by providing mechanisms for credit to be given to the creator as well as provide protections of users changing the content and preserving the content integrity.(“About the Licenses” )  Also this helps authors of open content to get around copyright barriers and getting their works into the public for use. (“About CC0” )  Ownership of the idea and original work is kept intact while the instructor using the materials is free to expand their classroom environment with new and relevant content. 

Sources:

Johnson, L., Adams, S., and Haywood, K., (2011). The NMC Horizon Report:

2011 K-12 Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.

Johnson, L., Smith, R., Willis, H., Levine, A., and Haywood, K., (2011). The 2011 Horizon Report. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.

About the Licenses . (n.d.). Retrieved from http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ .     

About CC0 – No Rights Reserved. (n.d.). retrieved from http://creativecommons.org/about/cc0 .