Creative Commons I have chosen three key artifacts to show my interactions with my fellow OLTD students and how those artifacts contributed to their learning. The first artifact is a blog post I created (shown in blue, italic print below) discussing Creative Commons. I chose this particular piece as it generated a keen interest in creating personal licenses for our work we post and share online. I had done some research on Creative Commons and shared this information with others in hopes they to would start to understand the importance of adding a license to work shared so that it would and could be continuously shared amongst those that found it useful. As you can see by the positive comments below from readers, they clearly were excited to learn more about this tool and many created their own Creative Commons license. I believe I brought positive attention to the importance of sharing alike and it made my fellow OLTD students stop and think about this importance and what it means as educators to share resources and be shared with. Blog Post My OLTD 505 instructor, Alec Couros, shared the importance of understanding what the Creative Commons is - as an organization, as a way of finding copyleft media, and as a way of licensing materials. That is what I have set out to do. I first visited the Creative Commons website where I found a very helpful video in explaining the purpose for the Creative Commons (Click the Creative Commons image to view the video). Before I dove too far into what it is all about I stumbled upon the license creator and I made a Creative Commons license for my work found on my website. Now to find out more about the link I just embedded in my website! My research led me to find that Creative Commons is a “nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools.” FREE! I was certain that this service was going to come at a cost, but was pleasantly surprised that it did not. By creating and placing this license on my creative work I can then choose how it will be used and shared by the public. For lack of a better term this is a really “cool-tool”! I have the ability as the creator of my work to choose if I “give people the right to share, use, and even build upon” my work. Not only does Creative Commons work to protect my work, but it also can help me find other’s work that I can legally use, share and adapt - if the creator has chosen that type of license. This is a huge step forward in the realm of collaboration and is exactly what our OLTD program has focused on. This is just another tool available to me to further build my repertoire of educational resources and increase my collaboration with others in the same field. Has anyone else created their own license for their work on their website/blog? I especially will be adding this license to my OLTD e-Portfolio, will any of you be doing the same? Does anyone have any negatives to point out about Creative Commons? Is there any work in particular that you have creative that you wouldn’t want to be shared or altered? What is it? __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________OERs The second artifact that I have chosen to show my contribution to other’s learning this semester in OLTD is an article I found called "7 Things You Should Know about Open Educational Resources" by Educause. I shared this particular article through our OLTD Google+ community where it gained a lot of attention. I chose this particular piece as it also generated some of the most positive and abundant comments. Not to mention my instructor wishing he had included this in his opening course notes! That has to be worth some brownie points :-) I had found this article helpful in my pursuit to understand OERs and honestly hadn’t realized the gem I had found until I read everyone’s comments. I was very delighted to have aided in my peer’s understanding of OERs, especially when some were finding it difficult to find such a clear and informative piece to aid in their understanding. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Twitter The third piece of evidence I have chosen to show my contribution to other’s learning is my blog post regarding Twitter (shown in blue, italic print below). In this post I shared my journey to understand Twitter. I wrote it from a honest perspective and I think my readers connected to my experience and appreciated my candidness. I shared such things as Twitter etiquette, the reason why you can’t follow hashtags within Twitter, but you can using Tweetdeck and Hootsuite and my personal breakthrough feeling more comfortable using Twitter as well as my understanding of how it can be a used as a useful educational tool. Judging by the responses (shown below) I received to this post I gather it got people thinking about what tool they prefer to use to follow and organize their Twitter world. Whether it was Tweetdeck, Hootsuite or another similar tool. For those that were not aware of these tools it brought attention to their usefulness. I think my honesty about my feelings towards Twitter and my change in attitude when discovering and learning the usefulness of Twitter really resonated with my audience and they could relate to my hesitation. I hope that I inspired those who are still hesitant to take the leap into the Twitter world and experience its “coolness”. I feel as thought I’ve just had the Twitter light bulb turn on… and not just a “flickr”, but full on brightness! I am one of those people that did not want to explore Twitter as I didn’t understand it and it was very messy and confusing. In a previous OLTD course I was taking I was asked to follow a twitter conversation during my first week of the course. I didn’t even have a Twitter account let alone understand how to even find this “conversation” that was happening on Twitter. The whole ordeal left me a tad bitter and frustrated and I’ve stayed away from Twitter since then. Then Alec Curosa came into the OLTD world and reintroduced me to the idea of using Twitter as a way to share educational resources and information. He very pleasantly encouraged the use and explained the usefulness it can have for educators. I thought it was time to re-visit this online sharing tool.
I started by reading instructions for the use of hashtags. I wanted a better understanding of why they are used so that I could be sure to use them properly when I am tweeting. Apparently there is hashtag etiquette (read about it here). Basically a hashtag (#) is the hash symbol placed before a keyword in your tweet (phrase/sentence/link/etc.) and this allows others to search that hashtagged word to find similar tweets about that same topic. It’s like another form of Google! And I’m a huge fan of Google so I’m liking the sounds of Twitter now! After viewing Cybrary Man’s Educational Web Sites – Some Educational Hashtags I found a few hashtags to explore. I chose three to start off my research: #ell, #elearning and #primaryresources. I chose #ell to check out as I am currently working in an ELL itinerant position and I am always looking for new resources and activities for my students. I then chose #elearning as I am currently working towards my Online Learning and Teaching Diploma. I found this particular hashtag was very active and the tweets were occurring faster than I could read the previously posted ones. The last hashtag I chose was the #primaryresources as I am always interested in learning with our littlest learners. I found this hashtag was also active. #primaryresources wasn’t actually on Cybrary Man’s Eduational Web Sites – Some Educational Hashtags list, so I got bold and decided to see if anything existed around this hashtag. It made me realize just how many hashtags must exist and the possibilities to search must be endless! Finding these three hashtags was very exciting, however then I had the thought of how will I “follow” them? I know I can follow my friends and collegues so I wanted to follow these hashtags. After a bit of sleuthing it turns out that you cannot “follow” a hashtag as it is not an individual, organization, project, event, etc. A hashtag “is a way to label (tag) tweets so they can be easily pulled together.” (Contentous.com) http://www.contentious.com/2009/03/08/hashtags-on-twitter-how-do-you-follow-them/ This want I had to keep my favourite hashtags in one place lead me to find an organizational tool called TweetDeck. “TweetDeck is a web tool that helps you manage and post to your social networking profiles or pages. Before TweetDeck was acquired by Twitter, it could work with a few more social networking sites than it does now. At this point, you can only manage your Twitter accounts or Facebook profiles/pages with TweetDeck. TweetDeck gives you a dashboard that organizes and displays separate columns of activity from your Twitter or Facebook accounts. You can actually access it via the web (in your Internet browser) or you can download the desktop application for Windows or Mac. By adding columns for tweets, @mentions, direction messages and more, you can easily watch tweets from people you follow in real time and easily interact with followers. It saves you time and energy from needing to sign in separately to each account and post everything separately.” (WebTrends) http://webtrends.about.com/od/Twitter-Web/a/What-Is-Tweetdeck.htm I have now set up my TweetDeck to include my three new-found favourite hashtags! I feel more comfortable using Twitter now to share my educational findings as well as search other’s findings. I see how Twitter is contributing to the sharing of online educational resources and I will encourage my fellow teachers to start sharing in this most meaningful way. Here are some links I found to be useful in my crash course on Twitter! http://www.wildapricot.com/blogs/newsblog/2008/03/11/an-introduction-to-twitter-hashtags http://twitter.pbworks.com/w/page/1779812/Hashtags https://support.twitter.com/articles/49309-using-hashtags-on-twitter http://blog.web20classroom.org/2011/11/its-all-about-hashtag.html |
AuthorTracy is a teacher in School District 79 (Cowichan Valley) on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. She graduated from Vancouver Island University in 2007 with a Bachelor of Arts in Physical Education and English as well as a Bachelor of Arts in Education. She is currently completing an Online Learning and Teaching Diploma and a Masters in Leadership. Archives
November 2014
Categories
All
Voices of OLTD 505
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. |
Learning Blog
Here you will find a blog of my learning that is happening in the OLTD program at VIU.
Photo used under Creative Commons from jillyspoon