ULearn16: Breakout Two - I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine (Creative Commons)

This breakout was about Creative Commons.  I did not really know much about this, so I thought it was the right time to find out more.

This is the blurb that promoted the session:

Creative Commons (CC) and Open Education Resources (OER) have shifted from sitting on the edge of education to now being a mainstream way of sharing and building on our collective knowledge. But, still many of us just don't have the time to get our head around what's involved and how to bring CC to life in our schools. So we've bought CC NZ Education expert Elizabeth Hertitage and CORE Education's Knowledge Curator, Paula Eskett. Together we'll take you through the who, what, how and why so you leave with a CC plan for your school, and new ideas for gathering legally reusable resources.

Sadly Elizabeth was struck down with a severe throat infection and was unable to attend ULearn16.  Consequently Paula was presenting solo.  These are my notes from the session with a little reworking.  I hope they make sense and prompt you to investigate further if this is something you feel you and/or your school needs to look into.

Paula spoke about going to a breakout lead by Cable Green from Creative Commons during ULearn15 and having her eyes opened to Open Education Resources. 

Green impressed upon Paula that content which is made with public money has a responsibility to be open to the public.

Paula went to a Creative Commons conference in South Africa in March 2016 and came back to NZ fired up over CC and OER.

The WHY of this is all about the children we teach.  CC licences are clear, simple, free, legally robust and you keep your copyright  -  this is your pitch to the BOT to become a CC school, the legal stuff is all done for you.

Creative Commons is non-profit, has open copyright licenses and operates worldwide.  It's about the GIVING and the TAKING.

We tend to think of permissions when we think of CC - but we need to think about it as "universal access to research and education, full participation in culture".

Under a Creative Commons licence, when you share a Google Doc, a piece of music, data, photo.... you still own the copyright.  You will be setting the boundaries for how it can be used however.

This is a video to explain how Creative Commons can work in New Zealand:

Paula explained how Creative Commons is working in New Zealand through a project called Koha and getting children involved in creating as well.

An overview of the icons for copyright, sharing and use:

The Licences combine as follows below:

You can learn more about the licence elements and how you can combine them and get to the links in the above pictures, click here.



This is an overview of the icons for projects:  https://thenounproject.com/about/  It is essentially about having a visual language that can be understood all over the world regardless of the language an individual speaks.  This has been a global project, including students participating from New Zealand, and brought about under the CC umbrella.


These are the platforms we could be using as educators and learners:


When we put up any content, the metadata we put in behind it loads it up into multiple platforms.
The question was asked: How does this work in with The Pond?  www.pond.co.nz is like Pinterest for teachers.  Paula showed us examples within the Pond that have CC attributions. 
A participant brought up the website www.teachitprimary.co.uk as a sharing place for lesson plans and resources, asking why we don't have a website like this?  But isn't this what The Pond does?

Creative Commons has a blog and a sparkling new website to access content.

What many teachers do not realise is they don't own copyright to resources they produce in the course of their employment.  Any resource you make while in the employment of a school is owned by the BOT and if you leave the school, the BOT of that school retains the ownership.  Unfair considering that teachers make many of these resources at home out of school?  So how does this work for teachers who are fulltime teaching and making and selling resources or writing for a publishing company?  Most schools don't have clear IP policies on sharing and reuse. 


Teachers need to get their BOTs to create a Creative Commons policy to keep their teachers safe to share their creations with other teachers (a real strength in the New Zealand education system) and avoid unnecessary conflict.  Start the conversation with your senior management and the BOT by watching this video explaining how a school can develop a CC policy and the benefits:

You can go to the Creative Commons in Schools page to find out more about how your school can develop their CC policy and what it means for the school, teachers and students.



Paula talked about how the answers are in the room when it comes to creating new content.  Grant (another participant) talked about how we need to work together to create content of high quality on Creative Commons.

President Obama has committed to having all publicly funded research as open access for the public before the end of his term as president.  Joe Biden, the Vice President, spoke to the American Association for Cancer Research about how important that this research is not behind a paywall or kept hidden - that others can build onto it.

Cognitive Mapping
We had to do an activity:  What are the opportunities for your school/learners if Creative Commons licenses and OER thinking were embedded school wide?  This was my cognitive map: