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 I can remember back to some of my first days in OLTD 501 and having many online learning terms thrown my way and MOOCs was one of them. I remember being thankful it was an online course and no one could see me Googling these terms! I had never heard of MOOCs and definitely had no idea what it meant. I felt as an Online Learning and Teaching Degree student I should have known what it meant and that perhaps I had been living under a rock. Now in OLTD 505 we are exploring MOOCs and I have been doing some investigating. I have decided that in the spirit of 505 where we are talking and learning all about sharing online resources through Open Educational Resources (OERs) I would share my knew found knowledge of MOOCs with those that have been living under a rock or are too shy to ask. Here is a definition of a MOOC: “A massive open online course (MOOC) is an online course aimed at large-scale interactive participation and open access via the web. In addition to traditional course materials such as videos, readings, and problem sets, MOOCs provide interactive user forums that help build a community for the students, professors, and TAs. MOOCs are a recent development in distance education.” (Wikipedia) I came across a site called, “Take the World’s Best Courses for Free” that listed many MOOCs that are available to the public. After seeing how many courses are offered at a University level and from some very respectable institutions, I wondered why would someone want to take a free course? While it’s a wonderful thought to think everyone is furthering their education for the pure joy of gaining knowledge and understanding about any given topic that one is passionate about, that is not usually the driving factor as to why someone decides to sign-up and pay for a course. One is usually seeking a higher education and the credentials to attain a particular career. So I wonder when one takes a MOOC do they get any kind of credit or a certificate that indicates their participation? How do MOOCS, if at all, help one further their academic career, let alone their professional career?
Do MOOCs offer credits? “MOOCs make an elite education available to anyone, typically for free but without course credit.” (Boston Globe) Many MOOCs issue certificates upon completion of the course, but very few institutions accept them as credits, even at the recommendation of the American Council on Education in early 2013. This lack of motivation has partly contributed to the extremely low completion rate of MOOCs (typically less than 10%), and thus helped casting doubts on the education model like an Ouroboros loop. (Georgetown) So if there is no course credit, what is the draw for the masses of people taking MOOCs? Perhaps this answers the question: “Today, some of the world’s top educators are extolling MOOCs as a phenomenon that could transform the lives of people unable to attend top colleges in person, including young people in Third World villages, American working moms, and restless retirees.” (Georgetown). However, I wonder what the draw is for someone who already has a University degree? For those with a degree is it a love of learning and not the credits, and the simple furthering of knowledge for their own benefit? It seems MOOCs are a University learning experience without the degree. Perhaps MOOCs are a stepping-stone for those considering University credit courses, or those in third world countries trying to get their “minds” on any education they can. As a teacher I understand and value education in any form, and support life long learning. I also understand that learning is the reward and not the credit received for doing so. However, we are human and there is that need to succeed and be validated for our efforts so I am very curious what are the reasons behind someone completing a MOOC? What would your reason(s) be? __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ In my search for answers I came across this blog of a man that decided to see if he could complete a Bachelor of Arts in one year through MOOCs. “This ‘Degree of Freedom’ blog will chronicle my one-year effort to learn the equivalent of a Bachelor’s entirely through free online classes. The ‘degree’ I will be pursuing will be in liberal arts (I plan to “major” in philosophy), which itself should open up some interesting conversations, given that MOOCs are just beginning to branch out from their initial focus on popular computer science subjects.” (The one year MOOC BA) “The entire course load for this project will involve taking the equivalent of 32 liberal arts college courses between now and the end of 2013, a number large enough to allow me to sample the product from every MOOC provider currently making headlines, as well as a number of other alternatives for free quality college-level content that don’t get this same level of coverage.” (The one year MOOC BA) __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 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 to me. 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 Couros 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 Twitter 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) 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) 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 Thanks, Marieke Holtkamp for sharing this information! Something to share with my students and colleagues! I started my “research” for this blog post on Monday, it is now Thursday and I have had mixed feelings about my findings all week. I first visited Wiki Educator and started to snoop around. I went to content, secondary resources, ELT resources (English Language Teaching), and finally resources again only to find that it took me right back to the ELT resources link. FAIL! I am currently an English Language Learner itinerant teacher so I was excited to find a link related to what I am currently teaching, however I was sadly disappointed when there was no true link to any resources. Onward I went in search of these amazing OERs I keep hearing about… Next up was MERLOT (no, not the wine). I found I couldn’t get away from this site fast enough as it made my head spin! Wait, now the name is making more sense! It was busy and not visually friendly. They had some very useful headings that I thought I’d follow through on and see what was “behind” them, but there was little to no content. As a busy teacher, I would never waste my time searching a site I’m unfamiliar with to “maybe” find something I can use. I don’t want to come across negative; I assure you there were positives, but not quite yet. I also found many of the OER sites only catering to high school or university level students. I am a primary teacher at heart and am naturally drawn to such resources so this was a very big let down for me. I made my way to TED-Ed where I watched the introduction video to find out what it is all about (click the above picture to link to the video) and immediately said out loud, “that’s cool!” It’s important to understand I was all by myself and nobody was listening to me! I continued on to search TED-Ed for a video I could connect with and see myself using with my ELL primary and intermediate students or my hypothetical primary classroom students. Again I found that the videos/lessons on this site were catering to an older set of students. I really like the concept of the TED-Ed videos/lessons, but I am not sure how I would incorporate them into my teaching – and I’m a techy teacher! I then checked out CK12 Foundation where I started to get excited when I found a resource called “Basic Speller”. I thought I had finally found something useful. What primary teacher doesn’t work on spelling with their students? I liked what I saw when there were levels to this resource, and a lot of them. It was clean and clear and easy to navigate. However when I actually started to evaluate this resource I found it to be extremely far fetched that a “Basic Speller” would be navigating the amount of script in these resources. They are visually unappealing to me, and I can only assume if they are visually unappealing to me then the students are going to really dislike them. It resembles a cold, stark test. I assure you children are shivering already at the thought of this even existing! So I promised positives… I did like that CK12 Foundation (wasn’t that a perfume or makeup?) allows for alterations to the resources and one can track their concept progress based on quizzes and other learning assessments. If I could make a suggestion to this site, and many of the others I would suggest alternate ways of categorizing the resources. While some may like resources categorized by concepts, other options may include grade or subject areas. I know these types of sites are going to evolve over time and will continue to become more user friendly and build bigger and better repertoires of resources, however at this time I wish there were more primary level resources available. Have any of you come across any primary OERs? If so please share! Perhaps post the link(s) in the comment area below so others can benefits as well! Thanks for sharing in advance! 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? Resources used in this post: Creative Commons Website: http://creativecommons.org/about Why Open Education Matters from Blink Tower on Vimeo. What a simple idea it is to share information and tools for learning. Why has this concept taken so long to set in motion? Within brick and mortar schools teachers share and collaborate in person, why not do the same within online learning communities and spread our knowledge and teaching tools around the world? Education doesn't evolve and help others unless it is shared. Keeping it reserved for those that have more money and access to it does not help the greater good. Education is supposed to be for all, and I don't feel that at this time that it is for all. Many schools in our province alone are struggling with the lack of up to date technology, I can only imagine those schools that have it worse than us. However, if we can’t share resources to purchase the technology tools that every school deserves, we can at least share knowledge and teaching/learning tools so that there is a less of a educational divide among students. Open Education means that no matter where one lives, with a computer and Internet connection they too can have access to these free educational resources. With Open Education more students will have access to current information and the opportunity to further their education. Those that normally could not afford a traditional education will now have access to gain the training in their desired field. This global movement will make education available to all, whereas it was once not. Teachers that were unaware of their out of date teaching tools, styles and information will now be able to stay current and share that information with their students in a way that works best for their student’s learning styles and needs. The ability to adapt resources from the Open Educational Resources will mean students will learn in a way that best suites their learning needs. It will also foster collaboration and participation among educators to make the available resources as rich and effective as they can be. There should be no reason why teachers or students are left out of the ever-changing educational loop. There is now a way to stay connected and current so students have the best opportunities available to them for their education. Resources EDUCAUSE. "7 Things You Should Know about Open Educational Resources". June 2010. Retrieved from the World Wide Web on April 28, 2013 http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELi7061.pdf. VIDEO Courtesy of the winner of the US Department of Education's "Why Open Education Matters" contest. |
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
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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