Travel Diaries of a Web 2.0 Newbie

I can’t actually ever remember noticing the Creative Commons logo on any of the websites I have used, but initially I was fairly depressed looking at the resources available, especially images, which I tend to use a lot. My problem is that in Biology, we tend to need images that show very specific details e.g. formation of hydrogen bonds between complementary base pairs in a DNA molecule. Now, you don’t find too many images like that in Flickr, unless it are someone’s artistic representation of DNA (which is interesting, but doesn’t illustrate the point I want my students to learn).

I have used a lot of images gathered from various other sites, but as all my material is limited to school use, I have (thankfully) not had to worry about the copyright lawyers kicking down my door. After watching the Thing 10 videos I suppose that I own the copyright on all the materials I have made at school; I certainly can’t remember any fine print about it in my contract (although now I’m thinking I should go back and check!) However, if I am going to move to more Web2.0 resources, I now have to be more serious (as do my students) about copyright issues. The creator of one web resource we use, the Online Biology Textbook, has gone the whole hog and contacted all the original creators of images found in Biology textbooks to get their permission to use their images on his website – an admirable achievement, but not something I’d like to do!

And s..t..r..e..t..c..h…

I was more cheerful after having a look at the Creative Commons Search tool, especially when I realised it was incorporated into the Firefox search box. A quick look on here for some more hardcore Biology images was enough to put my mind at rest about only using Creative Commons resources in the future.

I find that some areas are still confusing – for example, the Biology section of the Open Educational Resources site lists the Access Excellence website. Yet if you look at the Copyright Info page from the latter site, it states,

“All material on this website is protected by copyright, Copyright © 1994-2008 by Access Excellence @ the National Health Museum.”

and

“Graphics, activities, or other materials from Access Excellence may not be copied onto any other web site for any purpose.”

So is this material Creative Commons or not?

As for students not being able to use copyrighted images etc, it may mean that their choice will be more restricted, but hopefully it may make them think more about what kind of image they want rather than just pasting in the first image that comes up in a search. Making them more aware of the issues surrounding ownership of material on the web will be a good thing, even if it only makes them realise the plagiaristic character of the work some of them can submit. Although a lot of the work done using Web 2.0 resources will initially be done on our school’s internal virtual learning environment, where use of copyrighted material doesn’t seem to be as much of an issue, I think it would be good practise to start using as much Creative Commons material here as possible, in both the work I do and the work I ask my students to submit.