CASE - Copy And Share Everything

I have been having a lot of discussions lately with friends and colleagues about the sharing of information and the issues of information ownership and privacy. As an adult educator (I help adults learn and occasionally have been accused of being an adult myself), I spend most of my time finding information and sharing it with friends, colleagues, and learners. I also create lots of things that I either freely share on paper, post to the Web, or make available electronically. The question that seems to be rearing its ugly head though is this - do I share or do I worry about my privacy and IP rights? Hmmm...

Well my answer is, and I have come to this conclusion with the help and wisdom of my best friend who is much smarter and wiser than me, and by talking with many other great friends and colleagues - I use the CASE method - Copy and Share Everything. If I create something that I make publicly available I KNOW that it will be shared and re-distributed. So, I just know that all of my "stuff" will be shared. That's what I love about Web 2.0 - the community of sharing thoughts, ideas, and materials - what better tool can we as educators have? I have mo expectations of privacy or ownership - if I share something it belongs to the community of learners who use it.

Am I concerned about ownership and my IP rights? Well, for those few things where I might be there is the Creative Commons licensing options, and so far I have found them to be very cool.

So, if you see something of mine, and it's useful, please feel free to use it. It would be cool if you would drop me a line to let me know what you did with it and if you improved upon it, to share it back with me. Now that would be a community of learners...