Learning reflection 3 for OCL4Ed - The Right License
This final section of the course began with a video signpost by Frances Ferreira, from the Commonwealth of Learning. She offered a viewpoint from the perspective of those who are trying to overcome the problem of the millions of children who do not attend school and do not have access to education because they are too poor or because of the social climate where they live. As I mentioned in my Google+ OCL4Ed community post, I agree with Frances Ferreira that OC is not a panacea to the problem of out of school children but that it can be one useful tool to improving the situation.
But it does require cooperation and trust to make it work. It doesn't just require individuals to choose the right license. Frances talked about the issues of reluctance to adopt OER and how there is currently a lack of an enabling environment. It needs policies like that of COMOSA, and by governments and other education departments for their staff to be able to choose OCL.
We then looked at comments from Ahrash Bissell, on choosing which license to use.
This choice was put in the format of some simple questions to ask yourself:
- In what ways do you envision your work being used?
- What do you want users to be able to do with your work?
- Do you want your work to be as widely accessible as possible, regardless of whether it is used for commercial or noncommercial purposes?
- Do you want others to be able to improve upon your work?
- And if so, do you want to require them to make their own improvements available under the same terms as you’ve made your work available?
Reflection questions from OCL4Ed course. Adapted from
, prepared by the former CCLearn team, including Ahrash Bissell, Lila Bailey, Jane Park.
.
We were asked to comment on Ahrash Bissell's recommendation:
"When sharing, simple is best. Use CC-BY."
By this time, having read about the different types of licenses and their compatibilities (or rather their incompatibilities) and attempted to use them in a remix exercise myself, I was coming round to the argument that if you're going to share freely you should share freely.
I posted to the Google+ community:
"I do think that CC-BY is the best license for OER (if you produce works for other purposes then other rules may apply, but for OER, definitely), because only certain combinations of the CC licenses are compatible. We discovered in our remix exercise that usage of resources with different license types becomes very restrictive very quickly. If you are well-intentioned enough to give it a CC licence why not make it as free to use as possible? Even if that does carry the risk of someone using it for commercial purposes, it still gives ALL users more options for how to use it. #OCL4Ed"
We still had some more reading ahead of us on the nature of non-commercial (-NC) licenses, but by this time I was well on the way to being converted.
When we started on this journey -NC seemed a good ideological standpoint.
If I offer my work to the world for free why should someone else be allowed to come along and make money from it?But after trying and failing to remix a -NC work with ShareAlike (-SA) license in the remix exercise I began to realise that this placed a huge restriction on usage, even for a user who does not intend commercial purpose for their work.
Richard Stallman's description of free software began to make sense of this for me:
" “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer”."
Free Software Foundation. "The Free Software Definition."Amazing how a metaphor can simplify things!
And especially after reading Erik Möller's essay The Case for Free Use: Reasons Not to Use a Creative Commons -NC License I've realized that -NC just doesn't work.
Just before reading about Chris Betcher's experience and watching his video reflection I recalled that earlier in the OCL4Ed course Justin Cone reflected that he removed the -NC restriction on his video (possibly perfectly calculated positioning by our course coordinators).
This question of -NC or non -NC does take a bit of getting your head around. I'll just leave it off here by directing you back to Erik Möller's essay (which does include counter-arguments at the end). He argues it a lot better than I can.
I'm still on the fence as to whether -BY or -BY-SA is best.
I get the feeling one reason we tend to opt for -BY-SA is that we still want to protect our 'baby'. We don't want other people to exploit our baby and so want to give it some sort of protection against that. But is it really necessary? If users can get hold of it for free, how much real commercial value does it have unless the "exploiter" provides considerable added value to it? And lets face it, babies grow up into adults who can make their own decisions about whether or how they want to be exploited (okay, maybe not such a good metaphor, but what I'm trying to say is something like : do we really own an idea? and do we really want to restrict the creativity and innovation of people in the future?). I guess it comes down to circumstances to a great extent.
The last section of this course looked at technology issues. This was a practical element that I had not considered. I'll have to look into this in more detail. I suppose I was vaguely aware that the format I use would affect people's ability to modify or even share it, but as I've said, I don't do a lot of this stuff, so I hadn't thought about it. At least I am now aware of which formats can be used for what/by whom.
Actually, there does seem to be a need for a checklist for making your work OER usable.
ie.
- A set of questions on what you want users to be able to do with your work (as per the Ahrash Bissell questions above)
- What licenses or other restrictions are there on any resources from other people's work that I've used?
- A set of questions about technology format (does the format allow the uses in the first set of questions?)
- ... and probably some others
I wonder if anyone has produced one?
This OCL4Ed course has been very interesting and thought provoking. It hasn't just been a list of possible resources and situations, but also of philosophical and ideological viewpoints. I've also been provoked to think beyond my own circumstances by some of the perspectives of other participants in other parts of the world, and have been humbled by them. I do now feel more informed about the possibilities of open content licensing but also about the potential stumbling blocks.
No comments:
Post a Comment