Creative Commons Accreditation

This week I have started a 10 week course of study towards attaining accreditation in my use of Creative Commons licensing. I am joining a group of about 30 international educators who, like me, see the value of formalising our knowledge and skills in the area of open educational practice. According to our conversations on the course forum man, also like me, are asked about our use of CC licences and want to acquire a greater in depth understanding of the history and implementation of these tools when working online. 

The video above was created in response to the first assignment of the course. Made using Lumen 5 it uses images and music which is shared under CC licence, remixed to communicate a narrative which I hope resonates with many and shows why creative industries have much to gain by welcoming Creative Commons licencing to their activities. 

I am including in this blog post further factual detail around the history of the Creative Commons movement. I didn't wish to include these in the video as I wanted to keep the message simple and focus on the potential offered by CC to enrich our lives through digital creativity. Since much of human communication and activity is now facilitated through online activity thanks to the internet, it has become clear that the law around copyright is not sufficient to clarify our intentions when sharing online. Here are some of the landmarks on the road to clarifying the rights of all internet users:

• 1998  Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA). The US extends the term of copyright to the life of the creator + 70 years (longer than that agreed in many other countries). Sometimes referred to as Mickey Mouse extension and you can see why in the copyright section here.

• 2001-2 Eldred vs Ashcroft: a challenge to the CTEA which professor of Law Lawrence Lessig believed to be unconstitutional. The copyright extension was upheld. 
• 2001 Creative Commons founded.
• Dec 2002 A set of Creative Commons licences were created, built upon copyright law and increasing the flexibility of licencing. Inspired in part by the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License (GNU GPL).
• 2017 There are 1.4 billion Creative Commons licenced works

The existence of the global network that is Creative Commons, a movement which upholds open education and greater fairness for all has been of vital importance to my work as an educator and an open educational practitioner. 

Who are you?

On a reçu dans les casiers un petit doc à propos de la minute de silence, en comic sans ms, forcément. Question de tradition

— Monsieur Le Prof (@MsieurLeProf) November 16, 2015

This little tweet brought all the horror of recent events into sharp focus for me. 

I follow @MonsieurLeProf on twitter, He teaches English in the suburbs of France and has a wonderful, dry sense of humour. He is a skilled user of web based technologies and has a clear understanding of how to present his digital identity to the world.  Here he makes an off the cuff remark through twitter that illustrates the lack of general awareness of appropriate etiquette when using digital media. The incident? A missive for communicating the observation of a minute's silence out of respect for the victims of the terrorist attacks. It came via pigeon holes, written in the childlike, light-hearted font known as Comic Sans MS. 

The lack of understanding of the nature of this communication is startling. The printing press was introduced to Europe in 1439, nearly 600 years later publishing is in the hands of individuals, every office produces desktop published documents for circulation on a regular basis but much research into fonts and their communicative properties is surely common knowledge? Google it! YouTube it!  Find out here what your choice of font says and watch a personal evaluation of fonts here to help you make your own choices.  

This is computer-mediated communication 101, the most basic of digital communicative skills. Yet our educational institutions fail to recognise the importance of effective digital communication skills as vital in today's world. If we paid more attention to digital interaction we would understand that we only have a hope of addressing the unfortunate abilities of those with effective digital skills combined with murderous intent if we raise awareness of the importance of transversal skills.

These skills are no longer only the domain of the publisher. In the same way as music production, photography and film making have been democratised by the personal computer (and now smart phones and tablets) our digital presence speaks volumes about us. We look very foolish when we neglect these forms of communication and worry only about the face to face. 

Open Education #FOS4L Getting creative

Open Education is dear to me, creating tailored learning resources has always been one of my favourite aspects of teaching, But what's the point of all that creation if you can't share it widely and be inspired by others who critique or improve on it? But the concept of open is often misunderstood. 

Since the advent of digital I have not only been able to clear out all the ancient worksheets from under my bed (25 years of dust collecting under there!) but I have also been able to refine the best ideas and develop them for digital practice, sharing using slideshare, TES resources, scribd, issu, dropbox, flickr and other sites and the engagement with them has helped me to realise how useful they are to others. It's not always easy to find sites that display the creative commons licence obviously, hence my campaign on slideshare recently. 

The new affordances of digital tools increase the impact that can be achieved from a teaching perspective considerably. Using digital video for example can revolutionise the authenticity of language teaching and learning scenarios. I have been involved in the EU Video for all project over the past year and a half and I have conducted piloting sessions with colleagues in HE to get their impressions of this approach to encouraging creativity. Of course using commercial video or "finding images on the web" can be problematic and sometimes teachers get caught like rabbits in the headlights, afraid to create or encourage creativity in case copyright is infringed. So for that reason I took one of the Video for All examples made by one of my students (using poetry for student creation) and made some resources about Creative Commons (including a wiki page here) to support language teachers in embarking on their own make to suit their context. 

I believe that supporting the confidence of teachers to create and within their Community of Practice is very important. We have been disempowered through a series of bureaucratic practices in education for too long, good teaching is a fundamentally creative process and skills development in the digital era should be a priority. This is why I embraced Terry Loane's suggestion of Open Guilds and participated recently in the webinar. I also set up an open badge for other language educators (see below, designed by @mearso) so we can start to build a cross sector CoP to promote such activity. If you know a language educator who practices openly, please share the badge claim link with them!

Flexible pedagogies FOS4L

An invitation to join #FOS4L this week arrived just as I was coming to the end of a week's leave and returning to work to catch up on over 300 emails! (most were quickly deleted thankfully). As I catch up on open discussions taking place within the #fos4l spaces online and I see happily that it will involve interacting with some of my favourite folk in #edtech and making new friends I am instantly inspired to get involved. The suggestions for activities over the short 5 day course coupled with the fact it is already day 3 meant I decided to draw together my reflections together on the first 3 topics through this post. 

Digital literacies and identity:

My professional identity puts my role as a language educator before my learning technology role, although both are clearly very closely connected. I have reflected on this before for #ocTEL last year. My access to French language use afforded by the interenet feeds my language teaching identity, leading to an ongoing connection to the language as it continues to evolve - see this for example on authenticity. I also curate content to help other language teachers explore and manage their journey towards greater digital awareness. I very much welcome the inclusion of Wellbeing in Jisc's digital capability model as a recognition of the time it takes to acquire skills and knowlege necessary to be an effective digital practitioner. 

Flexible pedagogies: 

I am not sure I like this term as it implies a kind of fuzziness around how learning happens. Personally my learning since the arrival of the internet has been best described by the term heutagogy and I feel this is a useful learning theory, essentially reflecting the ease with which we can follow our own learning paths since the advent of ubiquitous access to information. As I have worked using this to inform my practice with students I have certainly found it to increase their autonomy and engagement. If we direct our own learning it follows however that we can refuse to learn should we choose to do so, no amount of teacher encouragement, threat or reward can force an individual to learn something that he doesn't wish to. I see this in my own refusal to learn that eating chocolate is fattening! However, I have to accept that heutagogy is a newcomer. The HEA have a very useful site on flexible pedagogies which I see as an umbrella term to encompass the sort of toolset I have always supported. Flexibility, willingness to adopt a learner-centred approach, devolve the locus of control to them and learn from them are all positive in my opinion. It is time to change our understanding of how learning happens but change stands little chance of success institutionally despite the helpful advice in this report unless they accompanied by a flexible approach to assessment. We get what we assess, our assessments also show what we value. 

Supporting learning:

I am going to reflect on this with respect to my leadership role in supporting digital engagement with my teaching colleagues. I have adopted the following principles:- autonomy, mutual support and connected, open practice.

• provision of self-service, just in time rescoures for skills acquisition e.g how to tutorials sandbox course spaces on our VLE and a central sharing community for all tutors to build a community of practice.
• show and tell sessions every term for dissemination and celebration of the best teaching and tool use. (see slides below)
• encouragement of PLN development through social media tools and open networks

Seems to be working for those who are prepared to accept that you have to make time in order to avoid reinventing square wheels.  A shift away from silos and towards a more open mindset are also required to value connecting for professional development. 

Real writing

Why get your language students used to navigating web pages which are largely populated by native speakers of the language they are struggling to comprehend? Isn't the use of techncial language and the culturally specific content only going to confuse them?

Maybe. 

But don't forget, many will be very familiar with finding their way around a website, they will have the contextual understanding to work out which button does what. And they can and will help others. Encourage some exploration.

Plus de deux tiers des Français avouent qu'ils ne connaissent rien au vin http://t.co/IYoQb54bEd
— 20 Minutes (@20Minutes) September 2, 2014

You never know what they may discover and it is all happening in real time!

I have used the French jobs portal ANPE as the starting point for a very real work related vocabulary activity and for a deeper dive into the skills necessary for students wanting to prepare themselves for life in the real world. The short video clips such as this one may be linguistically challenging but they are well sign posted for key words and the similarities between French and UK jobs clear. This opened up their minds to considering placements abroad  and these students had the equivalent on GCSE level French. 

Collecting shopping vocabulary using a supermarket site makes a lovely homework task, you can rest assured that browsing in French will continue longer than the usual 5 minutes! Use the Pointless quiz game metaphore and see who can bring back the item that no-one else found. 

So don't assume that all language your learners come across has to be carefully pre-screened. Our brains are hard wired to work out language, we may only bother if the task is real and sufficiently relevant. 

Ayez confiance!

Video in teaching and learning

Recently I was involved in facilitating a workshop for H.E. language educators on using video. The session took place at Southampton University and my plan was very technically demanding. I had just one hour to bring a self selecting group with varying roles and computer experience to the point where they would create and upload a video they had made through an unfamiliar online portal in order to earn an open badge. No pressure! 

Digital video can be enormously challenging, different devices using different encoding and having different playback needs. From a professional development context I felt a need to tackle video with my colleagues. My experience within our Languages@Warwick VLE research was that 100% of our teachers use video in their courses. The nature of this use was largely playback, and in my session I wanted to extend this to show that in fact we can use video in many other ways and so we decided to play on!
Here are the slides from the session.



 Future #highered students want to be able to create and contribute media to the virtual learning environment #Bett2015

— Helena Gillespie (@helenauea) January 21, 2015

We used Languages@Warwick's inbuilt video tools provided by Kaltura which include:

• screen capture
• webcam capture
• video assignment submission
• media upload

Almost all the participants in the session completed the video creation and submission and earned their #openbadge. They inspired me with their excitement. The technical headaches were managed by the system, the interface is easy to understand so the creativity can thrive. Here's one colleague discovering the joys of screen capture. 

digital literacies

Useful post on Steve Wheeler's blog. He proposes the following digital literacies:
•Social Networking skills
•Transliteracy skills
•Privacy Maintenance
•Identity Management
•Creating content
•Organizing content
•Reusing/repurposing content
•Filtering and selecting of content
•Self presentation
I think these are really important. Each would take a deal of unpacking but they are demonstrable and could be integrated with language skills to form a scaffold for online language use. Such skills are a vital part of the armoury of any online activity for tutors. Of course we'd have to replace that z with an s :)