Sharing and openness is with no doubt obvious feature of open learning. However for many of us it seems really difficult to come to terms with this fact. During our PBL group meetings and discussions some of us(including me ) expressed their fears connected especially with the issue of “sharing”. Working for different institutions we are not always aware of the rights those institutions have to the content we create. On many occasions we meticulously organize and prepare our lectures, lessons or simply different tasks for students . We spend time, look for interesting material and create something we are proud of. It may happen ,however, that ,  since it is so well done we are asked to share and then this strange feeling comes…People use my material but students think it’s theirs… We came to a conclusion during our discussions that we don’t mind sharing but we need to feel appreciated and acknowledged so maybe a kind of signature is required on each page or slide of what we have created ourselves to show others the author.

We concentrated as well on “Eight Attributes of open Pedagogy”(2015) by Hegarty among which Openness and Trust were of my interest in particular. I realized, thanks to this article, that it can be of great advantage to my own work if I share the things I create because it can be done without any harm to my personal perspective . Due to the trust students gain among their groups of e.g. bloggers they are able to accept criticism and improve their original work. The same applies to me, if I trust certain community and listen to their remarks I believe it should be beneficial to my piece of work. This attribute is closely related to Peer Review feature- students feel more confident surrounded by their peers and they listen to them more than to teachers.

The question we tried to answer was also how to share ideas and resources in a legal way not violating the  copyright law. We could do it by spreading the piece of work via connected closed communities. However, sooner or later somebody would wish to forward the idea further and what to do next?

At this point the Creative Commons Website was brought to light. This is  a really great legal way of managing copyrights of different sorts of authors and granting  permissions for any use of their creative work. This constantly growing digital community helps to copy, edit, distribute or remix content in a legal way.

My university uses Moodle learning system but  that is not enough for me.  For students’ learning purposes it will do but what about us – teachers ? I think we should have some platform for sharing ideas and work with colleagues from the same faculty or department. Our discussion in PBL group made me realize that I might want to be  open and share but first I need I a community I trust: my co-workers and then this specific digital tool- and there are plenty of such.

I’ve started rowing…