Some university teachers are encouraged to share their material digitally not only for their students but also for the public in Internet.
This is not easy for teachers and sometimes they are not willing to share their material on the net. There might be couple of reasons for this. Teacher might think he has used plenty of hours for preparing the material and is afraid someone would copy and use it – as their own material. He might think he wouldn’t like others benefiting from his work. However teachers who have inherited slides or material from a professor claim that it is very hard to use this material since it is done by someone else and might be done with a different kind of logic. Still they can use the slides but they feel uncomfortable to use them as such. Second reason not to share material might be fear. Teachers are scared of shareing the material for some reason e.g. they feel they cannot control the material, they are afraid of mistakes they have made in the material or they are afraid of criticism. Learning to use cc-licenses might help with some of the fears teachers have. By adding cc-license they can at least try to control their material and tell users what is allowed to do with this material.
At the same time a lot of material is shared in the internet. Texts and photos are remixed, reused and shared again. We see memes in social media and I suppose at least some of the photos are copyrighted. There is a discussion about copyrights in Finland. A blogger showed some examples how the cities in Finland communicate in their social media channels without thinking of copyrights e.g. one of the departments in the city of Helsinki showed video clips in their Twitter stream taken from a Finnish television show and another city made a meme of a movie clip. I suppose it is so fun and easy to take and remake video clips that communicators forget copyrights.
Openness is based on the idea of democracy but as it has been seen, open courseware, open internet, open data etc. are mainly found and used by those who are undergraduates or they have a degree, so they must be good learners (Weller, 2014). Althought, we have open courseware, material, software etc. they are not accessible to some people who would benefit from them. I think this an interesting question and topic to think about and I wish to have more time to read Weller’s book. And what about teachers, should they share they knowledge? If I consider all the problems we have nowadays I wish we could share knowledge and experience and use them to solve the problems.
Weller Martin (2014)The Battle for Open: How openness won and why it doesn’t feel like victory
Maija's blog 
October 28, 2016 at 11:55 am
I also wish that I would have more time to immerse myself in Weller’s thoughtful book. If you are going to explain a phenomenon or concept, and someone has already done it very well before you, why do the same thing? Instead, you as teacher can put more time in to supervise and initiate discussions with the students. Teaching with the help of film, images and non-textual information may also benefit the students’ different learning styles.
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October 29, 2016 at 2:53 pm
Interesting. Above all, I like how you problematise openness by pointing out that even if someting is open, not everyone will find it. I didn’t think about that myself.
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