Sharing

Just the title of Dean Shareski’s presentation, Sharing: The Moral Imperative, was enough to change my point of view. I never thought of sharing as an obligation — I do it “just in case” someone might want to use something. Often it’s for my students (lectures posted Slideshare) or for my faculty colleagues (like a screencast on why I like Moodle). Now I feel like I have a mandate.

It’s going to bleed into other parts of my job. Six years ago I posted my sabbatical project on the web instead of submitting it as a report, in case anyone wanted to use any of the units. I am being evaluated this semester (every four years, with a two-year recertification). That’s usually a pretty confidential thing. I’m now considering whether it’s worth the upset it might cause for me to put that whole process online in the open. Seems like it would be good for the process to be more transparent. Everyone signed a confidentiality form, but the purpose was to protect my privacy. Why should I want my evaluation to be private?

All my heroes share. Alec is sharing about us, and talking about making everyone a “sharer” (see the first 8 minutes with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach):

Sometimes sharing doesn’t get you what you want. I read Openness: From Sharing to Adoption, a post by David Wiley bemoaning everyone sharing but no one adopting the Open Educational Resources that are freely available. I think this is because the type of people creating digital resources and happily sharing them are not necessarily the type of people who will adopt someone else’s work. Instead, I think they’ll look through the free resources and get ideas to create their own work. Then share it. (I wrote a comment, but it didn’t get through moderation – maybe I was oversharing).

So here are some challenges to sharing. Putting my evaluation out in the open won’t be uncomfortable for me, but it might be for those evaluating my work. That’s a problem. Putting copyrighted material, which I use in my online lectures, out in the open causes copyright concerns. Someday a movie studio could come after me, though I guess all they could ask me to do would be remove something.

I can’t say that my institution has a culture that is not supportive to sharing – rather, I’m not sure very many people at my institution have thought about it at all. We revised the intellectual property policies several years ago to make sure faculty could retain rights to their own work even if it was online, to make sure the college didn’t get our copyright. Faculty share in our professional development workshops. But the only real online sharing I’m aware of is my colleague Julie Harland, who puts all her math tutorials online and has gained some college fame, and the Pedagogy First! blog we set up as part of the Program for Online Teaching, where sharing is required. Maybe we need a workshop on the value of sharing.

Or just the moral imperative. It feels like my responsibility now.