That’s me. I am more than willing to share in other people’s resources and less willing to share mine. Sharing to my colleagues sounds great, until they are used in the grade before you. Then the following year your students are less motivated because they have already been there done that. I would only post my resources if they were publishable (and who has time for that). Would you invite people you don’t know over to your house without cleaning up?
I wonder, therefore, how is open education going to work? I fully embrace what Li Yuan, Sheila MacNeill and Wilbert Kraan say in their paper on Open Educational Resources. “The concept of ‘Openness’ is based on the idea that knowledge should be disseminated and shared freely through the Internet for the benefit of society as a whole.” http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/images/0/0b/OER_Briefing_Paper.pdf If I am not willing to fully participate, then why would I expect others?
If one was teaching at the university level, then you could use your students to post and share resources. The teacher is paid and the students get credit for the course. Everyone is happy. But in the real world, nothing is for free. Why am I asked for my email before I can assess the “free” resource? Is it for advertising proposes, is it a scam, or am I now in a database and sold to the highest bidder?
When I first started using the internet for teaching back in about 1992, we would research owls. The search engine would generate 13 sites. We used 4 of them. Now you would generate 50 million sites. There is a mixture of junk and gems. There are web cams that show owls nesting and others that allow you to hear their sounds. Since owls hoot, you can’t do an image search with students. I think it is because the “hoot” is short for “hooters”. Unless my work is perfect, I worry about adding to the garbage dump and, therefore, making it harder to find information.
I also worry about copy right. I even looked up my title to see if it was original or not. It was original, so feel free to use it. Wait, am I starting to see the light?
I am not one to say, “The government should do something about it” unless I am willing to do something myself. Am I alone with my feeling, or is this movement going to need a paradigm shift?