Share and share alike

I won't forget the first time one of my articles was translated into another language. It was only the abstract, but it was translated into Spanish, French and German, for inclusion in an edition of the international peer reviewed journal Educational Media International. I don't know who they got to do it, or how long it took, and I can't say with confidence that it was translated completely accurately. I don't know, but I assume it was, because EMI is a professional journal. Just the fact that I was published, and in four different languages, was enough for me. EMI would probably have had to pay several people to translate my article, along with all the other articles that appear in the journal. But now that is all changing.

Since I took the decision to offer all my blogposts and slideshows for free under a Creative Commons License, allowing anyone to freely copy and also repurpose my work, some interesting things have happened. Firstly, I haven't lost any of my work. It still belongs to me, and anyone who decides to use it attributes it to my name. Secondly, my work is being amplified. It is spreading farther afield than I could ever have dreamt it would. It is appearing in other people's work, and it is also being translated into other languages. This slideshow, along with several others, has been translated into Spanish, and now just about the entire Latin American world is awake to my work. How cool is that? And I didn't have to spend a single penny to get it translated. I didn't even have to ask anyone to do it. People simply take it on themselves to translate, and I'm sure they do a very good job. This slideshow was translated by Thomas Ramirez Zumaran, and it has already attracted around 8,000 views in addition to my original slideshow (currently over 58,000 views) on my slide deck collection on Slideshare.

 

El Futuro del Aprendizaje from Thomas Ramirez

Now people are taking on the task of translating my blog posts too. The image at the top of this post shows one that was recently translated into French by Frédéric Domon. Here's the opening paragraph of 'Is all learning social?'

Presque tous les jours, je me laisse entraîner dans des discussions autour des fondamentaux de l'apprentissage, de la nature de la connaissance et des processus d’éducation. Cela va de pair avec le métier de professeur à l’Université et je m'attends à me retrouver dans cette situation très souvent. Lorsque je ne parle pas d'apprentissage, j’y réfléchis, je lis, fais des recherches ou écris à ce sujet. 

Pretty cool eh? Here's the entire blog post in French, including original hyperlinks. Again, I didn't need to ask, and neither did the translator need to ask my permission. It was self evident in the licence I applied from Creative Commons. My blogs and slideshows are now appearing in other languages. I'm very happy that they are, because now language is no longer a barrier to understanding. My ideas are out there for all to read, share and discuss, and that is my reward for offering my work for free under a Creative Commons licence. I think it's about time others woke up to this and did the same. Is your content being translated into other languages, and what are your views on this? My views are already well known: Let's share our content freely and allow repurposing under CC, so that everyone can share and share alike.

Rewired, not fade away by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.