A couple of minutes ago, I finished uploading open source versions of my latest World News for Kids study kits to the members' section of my resource site, English Raven. This is part of a general promise I have been making: that henceforth most of the material I produce will be in open source, editable format.
I'll admit, this is a fairly difficult thing to do when you try it for the first time. As in, when you've spent close to a decade striving to protect the identity and ownership of your materials, going to sometimes extreme lengths to keep it out of the hands of those filthy site scavengers who slink about the Internet looking for quality things to lift and pass off as their own on sites bulging with Google ads (making them money), going open source with your material on the Internet can feel rather like -- after doing the rounds and making it available to good people who will respect it and acknowledge your original authorship or design -- you are taking up to a week's worth of hard work at a time, placing it on a waiter's tray and wandering out onto a plain to hand-feed it to a pack of grunting and grinning hyenas.
Aside from that being a wildly over-long sentence, you might be raising your eyebrows at the strong rhetoric it contains. But I can tell you that, for materials designers (and especially those who work at it as something close to a full-time job), having your work lifted and any of your authorship notation removed so that someone else can basically 'sell' it as their own feels very much like having someone come into your bedroom and rob you while you are asleep a couple of feet away.
But open source, adaptable materials... This is clearly what teachers are starting to demand, and certainly something that they need if they are to both do their classroom jobs better and also develop more as producers and users of materials in their own right.
And that is the dilemma. The very processes many of us needed to put in place to protect our authorship and our (often quite meagre) revenue stream for the work we produce are also the very ones that prevent good, committed, professional teachers from getting the most out of them. Sticking to things like non-editable PDF versions of materials meant that, even though we couldn't always prevent them from being lifted and sharked around the Internet, at least we could protect the original version and authorship of the material. And, erm, yeah: produce stuff that teachers couldn't adapt (in the 'on paper' sense) for their own classrooms.
However, that all said, I've started seeing all of this in a different light.
Realistically speaking, there is no way to prevent someone from appropriating and 'messing' with your material if they are really committed to doing so. That goes for print, image, audio and video. While things like PDFs and access through secure membership portals can certainly reduce this risk, basically no matter how many safeguards you put in place, if it's on the Internet, it can be taken and abused.
I've watched fellow materials developers raise quite righteous flames of public ire on things like Twitter and blogs and forums when their stuff is filched. I stopped doing that years ago. To me, spending that many hours chasing and wailing about it just reduces the amount of time I have to get on with the job I enjoy: making more good materials for good people to use with good people in classrooms.
Basically, just making and attempting to sell educational material "as is" on the Internet is no longer a very viable business (if in fact it ever was, to tell the truth). One of the essential things to do, in my opinion, is to focus on those aspects of your creativity and expertise that really can't be copied. That can only be found in one place: your place.
What are some of those things (for online materials providers)? That can't be copied and can only really be found on your own well-established turf?
- A reputation for quality and consistency
- Regular, well presented and well organised materials all in one place
- Access to advice and tips on how best to use (and adapt) the materials
- A positive and productive interactive relationship between materials writer/designer and teacher/user/adapter
- Ethical goodwill (even loyalty?)
Probably most important of all is to understand that the scavengers and most of the freeloaders were/are never likely to become a paying customer interested in interacting with you.
And, when you are dealing with educators, much more often than not, they do the right thing.
For the past year or so, I've let members of my site choose their own subscription fee for access to all of the materials. Many would assume this results in teachers choosing the most paltry fee possible. The self-selected fee varies of course, but when I look at the contexts the various teachers come from, in almost all cases they choose a pretty generous fee (considering how much they earn).
Likewise, on this blog for a number of years now I have been providing free resources and downloads. Over the past year this has included a lot of open source/adaptable material. I see these materials appearing in adapted form on other blogs and sites, and in most cases I see very clear and conscientious referencing from the teacher concered: acknowledging the original idea and author and providing a clear link back to the source.
In fact, as I see it, the call for open source is gathering rather enormous momentum. Anyone interested in making material will need to heed it, or risk locking themselves away in their own cupboard.
So, as I ponder that open source bottle on my materials design kitchen table, I figure this has to be the way forward.
There will always be the scavengers and the crooks, as well as the naïve collectors and distributors who honestly don't know better when it comes to the ethics and 'done thing'. They are a bit of an occupational hazard for the maker of online educational materials.
But I also think there will be more of the 'good guys': professional and ethical people who will respect the material and sources, who will help spread the word about the services we provide, who will also be intrinsically interested in more of those non-copiable aspects I listed above as part of what they are seeking in a good materials/resources provider.
If worse comes to worst, I'll go down a raving optimist...!
=D
