A few weeks ago, I watched a session with Cable Green, the director of Open Education from Creative Commons. He had a lot of interesting things to say about access to educational resources and barriers in our education system. When I looked into his role on the Creative Commons website, I found that he “works with open education, science and research communities to leverage open licensing, content, practices and policies to expand equitable access and contributions to open education”. I linked the Creative Commons website and the page about Cable Green above if you would like to learn more about what they do!
He started by talking about what inspired his work with open education. He explained that the late 1990’s and early 2000’s brought lots of change to education with the creation of the world wide web and increased access to computers and laptops. This lead to a unique opportunity to be able to share resources with people all over the world, the only problem being that everything is copyrighted by default. So Creative Commons created a way for people to share their knowledge and retain their copyright, but also allow for other people to use and modify your resources.
I find this topic very interesting, especially because I don’t know as much about copyright as I should. I am more familiar with copyright in the context of books, because I’m used to opening up the first page and seeing the the copyright and publishing details. To seek more clarification on exactly what copyright is, I found this great video on Youtube made by Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada. I linked below for anybody who would like to take a look.
Also on the Creative Commons website is an “About CC Licenses” page about the different types of licenses they offer. The most permissive option is one that allows reusers to “distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator”. This license allows for the most change from the original material and requires that the original creator is given credit. At the other end of the spectrum is the most restrictive license, which allows “reusers to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator”. I think these licenses are so interesting and a great way to share resources with people around the world! It seems like an easy enough process and allows for more access to knowledge in all kinds of situations.
Learning more about copyright and Creative Commons led me to think about how I could teach these topics to my future students and encourage digital literacy in my classroom. I found a great article on Edutopia.org titled “How to Teach Copyright and Fair Use to Students“, by Karen Lagola. The approach to introducing this topic certainly depends on the grade you’re teaching, but I think this article has lots of great tips that could work for all grade levels. For example, one of the suggestions is to “Empower Your Students as Creators”. I think that this could work as early as Kindergarten. Although they are probably not posting their work on the internet, the principle of respecting their work and them as creators of it is important to introduce. Once you get to the older grades, you could start introducing them to the terminology, what it means, and guiding them through the processes of creating their own licenses for their work through Creative Commons.
I’m glad that through this online recorded session I was able to learn more about copyright and Creative Commons licenses. As I enter my teaching career this is something that I hope to teach my future students about. Technology in our world is only becoming more abundant and innovative so it’s important that young students know about how to properly interect with other people’s work on the internet.
I hope that this post can be helpful to others like me who don’t know a lot about copyright and Creative Commons licenses, but would like to. I’m happy that during this process I found some resources that can hopefully help my future students as well as other teachers.
— Sofia 🎀
