Giving it all away

How much do you freely share on the Web? If you are a user of any Web 2.0 tools, it's likely that you give away your stuff for free, and in doing so, you make a digital footprint for yourself. My digital footprint grows each time I post new content, whether it's on this blog, one of my Flickr accounts, or YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn or Slideshare. The killer apps for me though, have to be Delicious and Twitter - both give me the ability to make my content highly visible to anyone who might be interested.

Look, as altruistic as it may seem to give away all your content, ideas, lecture notes, videos, slides and even articles and books, for those who actually opt to do so, there are also excellent rewards. Give your content away, and you don't lose it - but you do get some great benefits. I have given away a lot of my content on the web - see for example my Slideshare collection of slideshows and published articles. My reward for doing this is multi-faceted. Not only do I get the pleasure of having thousands of interested people from all over the world viewing my slides, they may also favourite them, comment on them, or give me valuable constructive feedback which can I learn from. Some also embed my slideshows into their own websites and blogs, which disseminates my ideas even further afield. I couldn't pay for that kind of distribution. And as if that isn't enough reward, I sometimes get some really nice invitations to speak at events, or participate in really interesting projects, as a direct result of some content I have created on the web. Web 2.0 tools have that affordance - they make your content very visible to people who are interested.

Increasingly, due to the good offices of Creative Commons, much of the content on the web can be legally repurposed or appropriated for other use. I think this is a good thing. None of us want to waste time re-inventing the proverbial wheel, and we could bear in mind what Pablo Picasso once said: 'Good artists borrow, great artists steal'. So OK, 'steal' is an emotive word, which we probably don't want to associate with, but I get the sentiments behind the statement. A lot of art and music could be said to be 'derivative' - and there have been many court cases and fallings out over this grey area of creativity, but here's my point: I don't mind at all if other people borrow my content for their own purposes, as long as they attribute it to me and don't make any commercial profit at my expense. Many already have - some people have actually translated my content into other languages or used as a part of larger works. I'm an advocate not only of Open Educational Resources, but also the idea of Open Scholarship, which is where academics and scholars not only make their content available for free, they also open up themselves to constructive criticism from their peers. I hope we see more of this in the coming years and I am confident we shall.

Image source

Giving it all away by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.