Who owns what?

I have spent the past two days of my training working exclusively with 6 other ESL instructors. All of us will be going to different schools to run an ESL program for a well-funded and extremely well-staffed start-up which began only last year with a single school at which the teaching component of their program was functioning. There is a lot up in the air, a lot of questions with no answers, and seemingly a lot of work to be done by all of us. In order to lighten our load, we have all agreed to pool our varied experience and share whatever we "create" (in quotes...see Erick's blog and his comments and links on remixes) with each other: Kahoot! quizzes, worksheets, project ideas, assessment series, etc. We will be building off of materials compiled in our course textbook, activities we might have learned during our studies or from mentors, and lesson plans we might have overheard in the lunchroom or while walking by a classroom. Since we will be building and uploading our lessons during our work time, they will be owned by the company which is paying us just as research done on FSU time belongs to FSU (as a Gator, the story of Gatorade comes to mind, too). Should we be stingy and not share with each other in order to keep our "creations" for some future purpose? When we use tools like Kahoot! or easel.ly, are the objects we create really ours or even our company's? Don't they also belong to the owners of the tool with which we made them (see the Reyman article...are they "commodifying each social, creative, and intellectual act" we commit?)?

Web 2.0 philosophy has resulted in vastly more creators/producers, so this focus on delineating what is mine and what is yours and the concern about concepts of ownership and potential earnings reaches more than just the few inventors and artists who were able to rise to the top in prior generations. It has also resulted in gargantuan adversaries like facebook, who can harness the ownership and earning power of our creations (our remixes), leaving us with no way to fight back. 

Comments

  1. VanessaJuly 13, 2018 at 9:08 AM

    Have you discussed using a Creative Commons license along with embracing OER and then sharing? That's what I would recommend. Also, you can maintain some control over authorship if you post your creations to your own web site, blog, etc. (Hey! Think about our knowledge sharing/tracking assignment!) and then provide a clear point of origin for them all. This is especially useful if your goal is to become known as an expert practitioner for something.

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  2. UnknownJuly 13, 2018 at 9:57 AM

    Hi Victoria, thanks for the shout out and link to my blog! I hope you found the videos I shared useful. I wanted to comment on the last part of your post. I came across an interesting article this week about how copyright works with social media. What I thought was interesting was that in agreeing to the terms of service for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and the like, you retain the copyright to the content you place on these services -but- you are also granting them a license to use your content without compensation. And the language used in these licenses is extremely broad.

    For example, this is from Instagram: “You hereby grant to us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content.”

    For the average, everyday user, this might not be an issue. But it’s a different story if you happen to make your living in photography and could suffer a loss in potential earnings. Bottom line, while these services may appear to be “free” to use, they do have some potential hidden costs. Everyone needs to be aware of and understand what they are agreeing to when they sign up for these social media tools.

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