As a young history teacher I was guilty of hoarding my stuff. Now that I’m older I consider it a terrible waste. I remember being particularly proud of a ‘Middle East Conflict’ worksheet that contained numerous pieces of historical evidence: political cartoons, quotes from politicians of the time, diary entries, lyrics from a Palestinian song and some photos from a feature film. These were accompanied by what I believed were a set of insightful questions aimed to encourage the learners to sift the evidence for historical truths. The sad thing was only my few classes ever benefited from this little masterpiece.

I believe this hoarding mentality is widespread and has developed in part as a consequence of our copyright laws. In an effort to protect ‘intellectual capital’ copyright laws have developed a ‘restrictive’ framework that places control of how our work is used squarely in our own hands. Today you don’t even have to register your work for it to be copyrighted. By law the ubiquitous © symbol is assigned to everything unique you create, be that a worksheet, lesson plan, blog entry, forum comment etc. Knowing this some schools make teachers sign a statement in their employment contract that says anything created during the course of their employment belongs to the institution in an attempt to wrest control of these educational materials. Many teachers also believe that at some point their materials will become sources required in writing a textbook, which when published will provide them with the royalties! These type of concerns create a mentality where most teacher’s are reluctant to share their materials.  And the reality is that only a select few of us ever get published or derive any commercial benefit from our work. I would, therefore, like to suggest a copyright middle path where we can all derive some benefit from our creativity: The Creative Commons copyright system. (http://za.creativecommons.org)

One person who has already embraced this middle path is the US president, Barak Obama. Have you been to his Flickr page recently (http://flickr.com/photos/barackobamadotcom/)? While his snapshots taken during his election campaign are not going to win any photographic competitions what is significant is the way he has copyrighted these snaps. Instead of employing Full Copyright: All Rights Reserved, synonymous with the © symbol, he is using  the Creative Commons (CC) system where he has reserved some of his copyrights. These snaps can be used by others as long as you respect the three rights he has reserved: Attribution, Non Commercial and Share-Alike. Let’s take a closer look at these rights. According to Creative Common licensing you can copy, distribute and transmit his photos. You are also allowed to ‘remix’ or adapt the photos to your own use. (This is great news for us teachers as we can adapt them to suit our worksheet or test/exam paper needs!) However, we have to identify the author/photographer (Attribution) whenever we distribute the photo, we may not make any cash out of the distribution of these pictures (Non commercial) and whatever derivatives we create from these photos we have to copyright the new material in the same way the photos were originally copyrighted (Share Alike).

There is a fourth CC copyright which the president has decided against using: ‘No Derivatives’. It is possible to also reserve this fourth right. If invoked it means that users of this material may not change it in any way. The original may be used by others but not manipulated from its original state. From a teacher’s point of view this would be most disadvantageous. For example imagine an exam copyrighted in this way. It would mean that the exam would have to be used in its entirety. But us teachers would want to chop out questions outside of our localised curriculum, add in new questions and perhaps change the mark allocation... No ways if it carries the ‘No Derivatives’!

So let’s have a think about how CC impacts on us teachers. Imagine this middle road where we could reserve some of our copyrights and also encourage a wider distribution of the materials we create? ‘Attribution | Share Alike’ for example would allow us to be known as the creators of an evidence worksheet on the Middle East Conflict and have that locked into any variations of that worksheet in the future. That way our work would garner us recognition but also help address the dearth of materials in some of our schools on that topic. Rather than squirrel away our best work we could find it a wider audience. Want to use and share materials in this way? Go to Thutong and search for and upload educational materials copyrighted with Creative Commons licensing.

 Essential Links:

Obama on Flickr: http://flickr.com/photos/barackobamadotcom/

Creative Commons, South Africa: http://za.creativecommons.org

Thutong Repository: http://www.thutong.org.za