The old idiom, "share and share alike" came to mind as I was reading about Creative Commons licenses. The idiom means "having or taking equal portions" but the use of the "Share Alike" condition for a Creative Commons license has a somewhat different meaning. It means you are giving permission for others to use your work as they see fit, subject to any other conditions you might add, as long as they also share it under the same conditions. That means they can't publish anything based on your work with either more or fewer restrictions. It also means that if you are using someone else's work under this condition, you must include the same Creative Commons license. To omit any license would imply full copyright, which is more restrictive than the original "Share Alike" condition.
So why would anyone want to use this or any of the other Creative Commons licenses (non-derivative, non-commercial, share alike, attribution, public domain) on their work? Why would you essentially give away your work? To me, the more appropriate question is why wouldn't you share your work? Teachers work very hard to prepare materials and figure out how best to use them to benefit the students in our classes. But at best, all this work will benefit a few dozen people each year. If we collaborate with the colleagues at our own institution, then we can add a few dozen more. However, if we upload our activities or lesson plans to Tutela, or other educational sharing sites, or put them on our blogs, if we join in the exchange of ideas during the #CdnELTchat, then we can potentially benefit many more learners and teachers. So our hard work counts a little more.
The other side of the coin is that we have already explored some of this sharing by others during our "PLN" quests. We've already benefited from lessons shared on Tutela and from replies to our tweets. I have often found just the idea or resource I need from something shared on Twitter before I even asked for it.
Maybe someday, we think, we'll author a really great textbook our resource book based on all those lesson, and sell enough to retire. Having previously shared them is not going to prevent that. In fact, it might give you a ready-made audience who'll buy that book, just to have all your great ideas in one place! So here's my final question:
What's in your license?
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Resources:
share and share alike. (n.d.) Farlex Dictionary of Idioms. (2015). Retrieved November 9 2018 from https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/share+and+share+alike
Licencing Types (n.d.) Creative Commons Retrieved November 9, 2018 from https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-types-examples/.
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