Technology Infused Learning and Teaching

Although the task is to think about how Creative Commons “may” affect me professionally and/or personally, I’d like to focus here on how it has impacted me since I became aware of Creative Commons over a year ago.

I tend to be pretty oblivious to badges or logos on websites unless they’ve been pointed out to me. Call it ignorance, but in this case it’s true. If I have ever gone to a website with a CC logo on it, I never questioned what it was because it had no impact on me personally.

After attending NECC 2007 in Atlanta, which is where I first heard the term “creative commons”, everything that I searched for on the Internet to use for professional purposes was viewed in a different light.

How? First of all, I knew that images from Google’s image search weren’t in the public domain. For years when I taught web-publishing, I always told my teachers that you are not to use images from there unless you have permission. Then I would direct them to sources of clip art and images that were freely usable, with the request for attribution. In the cases of elementary teachers, the sites that I found were great for them because most of the images were geared for the eye of a younger child. That left out the middle and high school teachers though who I often found were grabbing images from here and there, without attribution, and using them on their websites.

Then along came Creative Commons.

What a difference this had made! I now have at my fingertips a vast resource of images that can be used legally for free. All anyone needs to do is provide a link (if published on the web) and attribution back to the source. I recall the expressions on the faces of the first group of teachers that I told about the Creative Commons search feature in Flickr. It made me feel like I had given them a present.

For the most part, the video clips that I have needed to use in the professional learning that I deliver has all come with an embed code. However, I know that teachers and their students need access to media that is freely usable. It has become important for me to promote the use of Creative Commons searches more now than in the past because an increasing number of both our teachers and students are publishing.

Creative Commons will, I hope teach both teachers and students about the importance of attribution and how they, too can contribute to the vast collection of CC licensed work available. I believe that if students utilize the media available under this license, they will find a far richer and deeper pool of resources to choose from, which will result in a better final project.

On a personal note, I recently presented at GaETC in Atlanta and created a Power Point presentation – the first I’ve done in years! My goal was to completely avoid clipart in favor of finding images that would evoke meaning. I turned to the CC search feature in Flickr and was able to collect a huge array of images. What made it even more meaningful for me was the ability to search both titles and tags of images for words such as ’sharing’ and ‘learning’. It was interesting to see people’s perceptions of these words in their pictures.

I do share content on the web via Flickr, wikis, and most recently Slideshare. After having found such great content in so many places, I almost feel that it’s my duty to contribute for the benefit of others.

(Word of warning…this Power Point won’t make sense without the presentation. I’m hoping to do a recording of it.)

One of the questions that we could respond to for this blog post was “Who owns your teaching materials?”. I think a gut reaction would be to say “ME!”, but given the fact that the materials I create are typically done both at work and on my school system’s computers, then arguably, they do. I haven’t had the chance to further research what the true answer to that might be. Is there a true answer? That is the piece about copyright and fair use that is so confusing to both students and teachers. There are no cut and dry answers, just simply guidelines that are subject to interpretation. Even though I say that my school system “owns” the content I create, I license it Creative Commons. What I create is not for my personal benefit or only for the benefit of Barrow County Schools, but for anyone seeking to learn.

Now as far as potential drawbacks to Creative Commons, there is always the risk that you might end up using CC licensed media that the licensee doesn’t have the “right” to license at all. I often wonder about some of the pictures that I find on Flickr that are under a CC license, but are photos of licensed media. In those cases, my instinct is to steer clear of it.

In the end, Creative Commons is a very blessed thing!

Image Source: Flickr CC screenshot