The best part of the internet and social media is how freely I can open up to you and empowers me to write things I wouldn't normally say. That however is not the point of the title of this post.
The topic of openness in this post is related to "Open Content".
It is also the topic of the 3rd MOOC talk that I am listening to.
As information is easily spread and shared digitally, sometimes we encounter problems:
Ownership, licensing, and giving credit where credit is due.
In today's world people often share, modify, and build upon each other's ideas. You can imagine the arguments and legal troubles associated with this.
Of course open sourced materials are a great thing, to be able to freely access something for your own personal use, entirely beneficial to you. But what about the authors of the work you take and use? What do they gain? This is where the decision of copyrighting and licensing come into play.
There are various ways to get pass this. There are many open education resources available, which are provided in this website: http://www.oercommons.org.
Creative Commons is an organization dedicated to reserving licenses while expanding creative works available for others to legally build upon and share.
So as there are ways to freely maintain access and build upon others works, we as metaliterate learners face no difficulty in doing what we do best: Collaboration.
Openness is a wonderful and also dangerous concept. While social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Youtube allow us to easily share information, it can sometimes be used against us. For example: if one has questionable pictures posted or inappropriate status', it can affect their job and social status. What we post of blog about is seen by people we may not even know. Also, to add on to access to information, it is easy to plagiarize someone else's work. This can lead to serious problems in school and work field. Overall, be careful what you post because you never know who is viewing.
ReplyDeleteI think that when authors participate in open access, they must understand that their right to demand recognition may fall a little to the wayside. These authors should be willing for their work to be shared, interpreted, or even modified. I do not think that this a terrible idea, because it is still a good feeling to know that their work has moved or inspired someone else. We are educated in so many ways, and I could not imagine what this world would be if teacher demanded recognition for educating students.
ReplyDeleteOpen access will reduce the cost of textbooks , that has the made the cost of education go up.It will also increase access to different educational resources.
ReplyDelete