I will start this commentary off on a humble note…… I am totally overwhelmed. I can totally understand the feelings expressed by +Mac Newton in his Google+ post on First Voices. How do I really engage in the whole idea of open resources and sharing when I cannot keep up with the flood of topics being posted by my very adept colleagues in this cohort? At the beginning of the course, I thought that we would have this great opportunity to begin sharing resources and OER content that would allow us to discuss the merits and shortcomings of what folks have been trying out. Perhaps it took me too long to realize that that was not the intent of the course at all! I should have known that if you take a bunch of teachers, show them the enormous warehouse of goodies that is the world of #OER, #Sharing, #socialmedia, and so on, that there would be a total shopping frenzy. Although I would like to have the opportunity to take time to explore a lot of the resources and tools that have been share, I do not see that as where this course needs me to be. I have been grateful to find out that there are tools that will help me create curated lists of things that I am really interested in. +Karen Gadowsky’s sharing about paper.li and +Kym Toporowski’s posts onContent Curation World and the Creation versus Curation link.
So how to proceed and still survive what I have found to be the hardest course for me in the #OLTD program so far? I need to find a way to synthesize the learnings about OER’s, Creative Commons and open licenses, Copy Left, Twitter as a classroom and personal communication tool, Curation, how to be a real Blogger, to name a few.
Lets start with Open Education Resources. The two videos below do a decent job explaining Open Access
For those of you that want to really get involved with OER you could attend the 2015 OpenCon in Belgium this Fall. #OpenCon is a professional conference on Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data organized by the Right to Research Coalition, SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), as well as students and researchers from around the world. The purpose is to bring together experts in the field of OER to support and encourage projects that advance OpenCon’s 3 areas of focus: Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data.
A great, easy to understand, explanation of Creative Commons licensing was written here by Sara Hawkins.
So then you ask, what is the difference between Copyright and Copyleft? I think, simply put, I will copyright when I don’t want to share my stuff and copyleft when I do. The detailed explanation can be found at: http://www.slideshare.net/mhardy/copyright-or-copyleft-creative-commons.
If you want to see my attempts at Twitter, you can check me out at @fedward14. You will discover that I am a complete newbie at this communication venture. That brings us to blogging, on which you have just been reading my thoughts. Let me know what I am missing. Don’t be afraid to be brutally honest, I can take it, but please take the time to let me know how to do this stuff better.
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