Your Attention is Needed!
Over the coming month, the OCW Consortium will be sending out several e-mails that need your attention. We are trying to improve our services to members, and we need to hear from you! Please take a few moments to respond to the surveys and inquiries when you receive them. Together we can build a stronger Consortium and a sustainable future for OpenCourseWare around the world. Thank you!
Reaching out to local communities: Translation volunteers wanted
The OpenCourseWare community has always valued the sharing of ideas on an international scale. The Consortium now has over 250 members who speak numerous languages. In order to reach out to more people in local communities, we invite volunteers to translate the OCWC newsletter, webinars, the OCWC Toolkit, and other documentary evidence so that what we do reaches out to more and more people. The October issue of the OCWC Newsletter is offered in six different languages this month. The translations were done by wonderful volunteers from our member institutions. If you are willing to volunteer your time in translating, please email meena@ocwconsortium.org. More volunteers in the five languages shown on top of this newsletter are also welcome.
OCWC Webinar in November
Intellectual property clearance always presents a big issue for all of us involved in OpenCourseWare. The OCWC webinar in November will be on Intellectual Property. Terri Bays of OCWC will present on “How to Identify and Manage Issues in IP”, followed by a Q&A session. It will be on November 5th, 10AM EDT. Please sign up on the widget here or email meena@ocwconsortium.org. Last month’s talk by Mara Hancock can still be seen here.
OCW Conferences
Here are some more opportunities to hear about OpenCourseWare from around the globe.
* Presentations from the OpenCourseWare Seminar at TU Delft last week may be seen here.
* On the 22nd in Boston is “Publishing Course Curricula: What It Is All About and Why It Matters.” More information can be found here.
* From the 4th to 7th of November, the first Asia Regional OCW Conference will be held in Seoul, Korea. Please email ocw@korea.ac.kr for more information.
As both the hiring and the fall teaching cycles get underway, we’re seeing a rash of articles in the Chronicle about various forms of Academic fraud. Today’s “Strange Tales From the Trenches” by Daniel J. Ennis and Arne R. Flaten (http://bit.ly/8ms1F) follows, for example, last Saturday’s “Should You Discuss Your Work in Progress?” (http://bit.ly/fEUk5) by Gina Barreca. The latter provoked a stream of comments by academics concerned about their research ideas being stolen, and I felt compelled to add a remark about not letting our concern to protect our ideas prevent us from engaging in the types of collaboration that brought so many of us into academics in the first place.
There’s more to be said than simply urging folks not to lose their sense of sharing, however. Those who have published their ideas in OCW know that OCW publication can be a way to stake their claims to ideas or techniques long before they are ready to publish research articles. The digital versions are date-stamped by the hosting server, so, should they actually need to take a case to court, they have tangible evidence of their prior claims. This is where it’s important to remember that OCW publication does not mean relinquishing either copyright or the right to attribution.
Granted, this isn’t enough to prevent someone from pursuing your line of research and drawing more insightful conclusions than yours (ideas cannot be copyrighted). This (as both Barreca and several commentators pointed out) is part and parcel of academic life. It will, however, give you recourse in cases like those described by Ennis and Flaten, where work either simply is used without permission or citation or more egregiously is misrepresented as someone else’s creation. Having your work visible and labeled as your own allows the vigilant to find evidence of fraud when they go looking rather than harbor vague suspicions they have no way of substantiating.
On the brighter side, sharing your nascent ideas with students, with colleagues and with the wider learning community opens you to further opportunities for academic growth. Those potential thieves are also your potential cheerleaders, muses and collaborators. Keeping your ideas to yourself might keep you safe, but it will also keep you isolated.
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