Teaching Approaches/Adapting and sharing resources: Difference between revisions

* What can you ‘do’, legally, with this information, in terms of re-using it?

Like printed materials or works of art, everything published on the web is protected by copyright, even if it looks as if it is ‘free’ information. The rules on copyright, which are already complicated, become more complex in an online world, because it is so easy to copy and transfer electronic information to other people.

There are exceptions to the copyright rules which allow you to do a little more with material you find within your teaching than in other contexts.

Using material you find on the web has been made easier in recent years through Creative Commons, which provides a system of licensing to enable people to share and re-use information easily.

Play this video from Creative Commons for a brief introduction.

Now look at the Creative Commons [http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses licenses]<nowiki>; note the increasing degrees of protection they offer for the creators of material, and also what constitutes ‘use’. Note down which of the licenses are the most useful, from your point of view. </nowiki>

Creative Commons extends and works alongside copyright to enable people to share their work. This works well for us as consumers of information because it expands the amount of information available for us to re-use.

Flickr is a site for sharing photographs. The advanced search options in Flickr enable you to search within Creative Commons licensed content. You can restrict your search according to what you ultimately want to do with what you find. For example, you can search just for images that you can edit. This is a quick and easy way to ensure that you find material quickly which suits your purpose.  

* Do the same search on ‘digital native’. How many items did you find this time? What you can ‘do’ with this material?  

When we did this search, there was a significant difference in the number of hits and what we were able to ‘do’ with the content we found. Restricting the search to only those items licensed under Creative Commons reduced the number of hits from 7000+ to around 1000, and what we could do with the material found was much less restrictive. However, you do need to be careful because of the different sort of Creative Commons licences, most of which do require that you give appropriate attribution for the images you use (e.g. if you are including an image in a presentation you may also have to include the url where you found the image).  

Like Flickr, Google’s advanced search options enable you to filter your results according to what you ultimately want to do with what you find.  

* Go to the [http://images.google.co.uk/ Google Images]&nbsp; website.  

* Search for material on a topic of your choosing. Write down the search term that you are going to use.

Click on a few of the items to look at what you can do with the material.  

Searching in this way is a good idea in two respects – it reduces the number of items you have to deal with and ensures that you get material which you can reuse. For example, when we did this search, using the word ‘fish’, and restricting the results to those ‘labeled for reuse’, we were able to reduce the hits on Google images from over 104 million to a more much manageable 500.  

When looking for material to use in the classroom, using ‘reliable, high quality’ sites to start with can take some of the guesswork out of finding resources that can be re-used legally. The objective of this course activity is to revisit the sites you normally use, and review them to see whether they are good sources of legal-to-use information.

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