I just read the article Shift From Students as Consumers to Creators in the NMC 2015 Horizon Report K-12, page 14, and experienced widely conflicting emotions while reading through it. My emotions ranged from excitement and joy to outrage, disgust and blackness for the future.A primary focus of mine is supporting educators to shift more and more away from the "Sage spouting on the Stage", exerting expertness. My preferred focus is one of facilitator and solution focused coach actively engaging students to become experts and facilitators of their own learning. Over the last twenty years of working with people, often marginalized individuals and groups that had been written off by communities, law enforcement and schools, I have witnessed the power of an Interest or Values based, solution focused approach. This supports people to take more charge of, and responsibility, for their lives, their progress and, their learning. The trend outlined in the article that encourages students to create and share their knowledge, creativity and skill, is to me, the education direction of tomorrow emerging today.
Then there is the flip side to this. We now have American schools that are proposing that they should have copyright ownership of teacher and students creations and benefit financially from them. I guess if there is money to be made, educational businesses are going to try to capitalize on it. This seems to be emerging primarily in the United States. Canada has created different copyright law for education that appears, in my interpretation, to circumvent schools being able to copyright students creations. One more reason to be proud to be a Canadian! I am sure that teachers employed and remunerated by Canadian school districts are working under a different set of rules in terms of who owns their creations. For me, this is the next hurdle and cause to support; supporting more widespread Creative Commons licensing to support free distribution and adaptation of creations for educational environments. Of course this will mean shifting, not only many schools perspective but also that of many educators.
Post Note:
The NMC article seems to be focused on American law and perspective especially where students are concerned. I have provided links to both the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada and the informational document, Copyright Matters! that explains Canadian educational copyright considerations.
Links
Then there is the flip side to this. We now have American schools that are proposing that they should have copyright ownership of teacher and students creations and benefit financially from them. I guess if there is money to be made, educational businesses are going to try to capitalize on it. This seems to be emerging primarily in the United States. Canada has created different copyright law for education that appears, in my interpretation, to circumvent schools being able to copyright students creations. One more reason to be proud to be a Canadian! I am sure that teachers employed and remunerated by Canadian school districts are working under a different set of rules in terms of who owns their creations. For me, this is the next hurdle and cause to support; supporting more widespread Creative Commons licensing to support free distribution and adaptation of creations for educational environments. Of course this will mean shifting, not only many schools perspective but also that of many educators.
Post Note:
The NMC article seems to be focused on American law and perspective especially where students are concerned. I have provided links to both the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada and the informational document, Copyright Matters! that explains Canadian educational copyright considerations.
Links