License

EDIM 514 by Shanna Lentz is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

I chose to license my blog based off of a few criteria. First, I wanted an
"Attribution" license, which allows others to use my work, if they give credit to me or my blog as the source. Since I will be posting a multitude of reflections on my blog, it is the text itself I am licensing. I have no problem with others referencing or using my text, as long as they give me credit for my work.

The second part of my license is "Noncommercial." It stipulates that a person cannot make a profit from using my work. While I have no problem with others using my work and crediting me for it, I am not comfortable with others profiting from my work. For example, if someone wants to use my blog text in an article they write, they may not publish that article in a for-profit magazine, for which they would get paid; however, they may use my blog text in an informational booklet used for educational purposes.

While I don't want others making a profit off of my work, I don't mind if someone uses my blog text to create a derivative of my work. Using the example above, if someone wants to use my text as a part of an article they write, they may do so, but they must give me credit for my work. They must also license their own derivative of my work (in this example, their article) under the same kind of license I am using. This "Share-Alike" option was especially important to me, considering the fact that my work could circulate through a variety of sources once someone publishes a derivative of it. Since I still want credit for my work, and since I don't want anyone making a profit off of it, this share-alike option is best, because it forces the user of my work to use the same license, thereby continuing to protect my work in the same manner.

If suggesting to my students that they use a license for any of their work, I would need to consider their own wishes, as well as the format in which the work was published. No matter what format their work is in, I would, at the very least, suggest an attribution and share-alike combination license, so they still receive credit for their work, no matter who uses it and passes it along. I think encouraging students to license their work in this way might help instill in them a sense of pride in their work, as they are claiming ownership of it. In terms of creating derivatives of their work, the students would have to consider the format to decide if they wanted the original work to be used in a different way. For example, if students created an original movie, they would have to decide if they would allow others to use clips of their movie as part of a newly created one. In this instance, they might also want to consider whether they would want someone to make a profit from using that clip in this new derivative of their original work. These two options, I think, are based on personal preference, but I think educating students about the potential outcomes of each type of license is extremely important, so that students have a true understanding about what users could do with their work.