Chris Betcher

As many of you may know, I'm a big supporter of Creative Commons and the ideals of open sharing. I publish most of my stuff under a CC licence, usually BY-SA, because I think sharing is important and I believe that the world is a better place if we allow others to build on what we do (in the same way that I often build on the influences of others). So, a while back I published a couple of things to the OER Commons ; a site where teachers can upload and freely share their educational resources with others. The general idea is that if you publish to OER Commons, anyone can take your work and remix it and build upon it to create a version for their own individualised use. For busy teachers who all too often find themselves "reinventing the wheel" in the creation of their own teaching resources, it's a brilliant concept. You can also attach metadata to the resources you share to make them more searchable, and even map them to the US Common Core standards if you wish. If s...

tl;dr ... just click here and do the right thing. I've done it. You've probably done it too.  You're making some kind of digital product and you needed a digital asset of some sort to use with it. Maybe you were putting together a short video and needed some music for the soundtrack, or maybe you were working on some kind of poster and needed an image to include on it. Fortunately, we live in a world where we have access to amazing digital tools that make it easy to create, as long as you have some raw materials to work with. While it's technically quite simple to just find what you want online and use it, there are some ethical (and legal) questions about just taking anything you find on the web and using it as your raw material. Unless you have permission to use those resources you really shouldn't use them. It's effectively stealing. Thankfully, that's where  Creative Commons comes in. Creative Commons provides a legal and ethical solution to...

Here's the follow-up from my last post about the copyright claim that YouTube made on a video I made using a Creative Commons soundtrack. You can read the previous post for the start of the story if you're interested. Since then, I've had conversations with several people about the issue. One was Jeff Price, the CEO of Audiam . Audiam was listed by YouTube as the entity responsible for policing the claim. Audiam is a service that musicians can use to track the use of their music in YouTube, although I think they also monitor Spotify and a few other streaming services as well. Basically, when a musician signs up to use Audiam's services they upload a sample of their music which gets passed on to YouTube and fingerprinted. Fingerprinting is a process whereby the track can be compared against existing tracks to see if it matches, thereby identifying the copyright status of the music. If a match is made, YouTube flags it as a copyright violation and that was the problem I ...

A few weeks ago I got home from a short holiday in Bali. We had a great time, and managed to collect a few snippets of video along the way using a GoPro camera. A few days after I got home I managed to stitch a few clips together into a little video summary of the holiday using my own footage and some Creative Commons music that I sourced from Jamendo, one of of my favourite sources for CC-licensed music. I used a happy little track called " 8_Happiness AC2 " by an artist called " Music for your Media ". The track was licensed under a CC BY-ND-NC licence - meaning that if I attribute the artist (I did), don't modify the music (I didn't), and not make money from its use (I'm not), I was welcome to use it. That's the nice thing about Creative Commons licensing; the terms and conditions of use are clear, explicit and fairly unambiguous. Or so I thought. After I edited the video - all 2 minutes and 52 seconds of it - it was published to YouTube. The ne...

When I lived in Canada for a while, I was always a little bemused by the Canadian approach to speed limits. The maximum allowed speed limit on the QEW and the 400-series roads around Toronto is 100km/h and yet if you actually do that speed you just about get run over. The locals routinely cruise the highways there at 120-130km/h and there's no issue. I like to drive fast too, but it used to frustrate my sense of logic when I'd ask my Canadian friends why they didn't observe the speed limit. "Oh, it says 100," they'd say, "but nobody actually drives at 100, we drive at 120." "Why don't they just raise the speed limit to 120", I'd ask. "Because then people would just do 140" came the reply. Apart from being a really strange view of human nature, I'd then ask, "Why don't you just post the speed limit that you actually want people to observe and then enforce that, instead of having this vague gray area where peopl...

If you like, you can skip right to the bottom of this post and just watch the video, but I always find the story behind the story kind of interesting. So I thought you  might like to know a little bit about how and why this video was made. It started out with a simple tweet from my buddy Kim Sivick in Philadelphia.  It started a conversation that went something like this... Do I know anyone who might make a quick Welcome to Australia video? I sure do. And besides, I owe Kim a favour. When I was running blogging workshops with our staff last year I was hoping to tap into the experiences of some very blog-savvy educators by getting them to Skype in and talk to our teachers about the realities and the practicalities of using blogs in the classroom. When I asked for volunteers on Twitter (where else?) Kim Sivick  was one of those who generously responded and agreed to spend time talking with us to share her expertise. I also got to meet Kim in person at ISTE in Philadelphia ...

I took part in the Open Content Licensing for Educators online course that ran all last week.  It was run by the team at WikiEducator and was a great insight into the many copyright issues that can be addresses by creating Open Educational Resources using clear and open licensing terms. I know that many educators don't think in terms of "licensing" their work, but really, whenever you make something that can be used to help either you or others teach, it's a "resource" and the way that you indicate how you are prepared to let others use that resource can be considered a "license". The thing that became screamingly obvious as I worked through the online course content last week was that... a) All educators need to get much, much better at MARKING our work (where we're allowed to) with some form of designation that indicates how we wish to share it. We all produce resources, but very few of us consciously consider marking those resources with a ...

Although I've not managed to keep up fully with the Open Content Licensing for Educators course being run by the WikiEducator group this week, I have managed to spend enough time with to do a bit of thinking about copyright, Creative Commons , and what all this stuff means to me as an educator. The course has been a good introductory overview of these issues, although I was already fairly aware of much of  the information being shared. The real value was in connecting with other educators from all over the world and hearing so many different perspectives on how traditional copyright can be so debilitating, especially in the developing world. I certainly don't claim to be an expert on this copyright law stuff, but I have been taking a keen interest in the work of the Creative Commons folk for quite a while now and I try to take every opportunity to promote the benefits of the Commons. Reading through the forums, it's clear that this hasn't been the case for everyone, a...

One of the things I feel quite strongly about is encouraging the responsible sharing of educational content through appropriate open licenses. There are lots of problems created by traditional copyright, and anyone who works in a school knows just how silly the copyright rules can be at times. While I understand the need for content creators to protect their work from being stolen and to protect their right to make a living, there are many times when the rules imposed by traditional copyright just seem completely absurd. I've pushed the idea of Creative Commons for a number of years now, and I try to make sure that everything I produce is published under a CC license. I want to share by default , not by exception, and I can't help but imagine what a better world we'd live in if everyone did the same. It's so ironic that so many teachers are the most blatant abusers of copyright, yet feel so affronted when it's suggested that they license their work in a way that m...

It’s that time of year when I start to get a lot of teachers at school asking me for assistance with creating an end of year slideshow of photographs of their classes, often with an intention to create a DVD that can be sent home as a memento of the year. It’s a lovely idea, and I encourage it.  The kids love it, and it’s a lovely way to finish the year. To assist with this, I thought I’d offer a few tips and suggestions on making slideshows... Start by gathering all the photos you intend to include into a single folder.  It’s much easier if all your assets are already gathered in one place before you begin working with them. Use a piece of software well suited to the task.  Although PowerPoint is often suggested, it’s a bit of a dog when it comes to putting these types of presentations together.  PowerPoint is the right tool for slideware presentations, but it’s actually not very good at doing “slideshows” with music.  The end product of PowerPoint is, well...

My role at school is all about trying to helping teachers leverage technology to come up with more interesting and engaging ways to help their students learn.  Some of our older students are in laptop programs which gives them fulltime 1:1 access to their own computer but many still do not, especially in the junior years. Which is a bit of a shame since there is, I think, so much scope in the younger grades to use technology in interesting ways that support the curriculum.  Unfortunately, with the way things are structured at the moment, our primary kids get scheduled into a single one hour lesson in the computer lab each week.  That's not really my preferred option, as it's hard to get technology integration working in an ongoing, embedded way when it involves trotting off to the computer room once a week. Ironically, all our primary classrooms do actually have a small pod of four desktop machines in them, but unfortunately I don't really see them getting used in any con...

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why Larry Lessig is one of my heroes. This is a terrific video that ought to make you very angry (or at least, damn annoyed!) The question is, what will you do about that anger? Are you in this fight? And what part are you, as a modern educator, playing in creating this important reform? Recorded at TEDxNYED