 Hi everyone and thanks for joining us at OpenEd 21. We are looking for your help to conceptualize our student-facing copyright guide in a more emancipatory framework. So my name is Marni Seal. I'm the manager of the library and learning commons here at Cambrian College, and I'm joined by my colleague, Jess O'Reilly. Hi there. Jess O'Reilly, I'm a program coordinator and professor at Cambrian College. And an EDD candidate with Athabasca University's Doctor of Distance Education program. So the reason that we decided to look at this is that, you know, we've noticed that there isn't a lot of student-facing copyright information, especially for non-graduate level students. Not to say that some institutions haven't haven't tackled this already. I know certainly some have and they've done a good job of it. But I'm finding especially at smaller institutions like ours that don't have formalized positions for copyright support or a dedicated copyright office. It is it is a bit more of a struggle to communicate this information with our students and get it out there in a good interactive way. The information about copyright tends to focus on the more punitive aspects. You know, if you don't follow these these guidelines, there could be major consequences. And I find that this is in line with the fact that many of the copyright guides and things that I've seen, again, focus on restrictions to posting content to things like note sharing websites or providing course materials to those commercial study prep services, you know, warning students off of that sort of activity. It's very focused on the protection of institution-owned academic materials. And in discussion with Jess, while we were we were co-developing a resource to support students for evaluating sources in an assignment, we realized that overall this this approach really contributes to a very traditional Western sort of view of intellectual property. In assessing and evaluating sources that aren't the typical scholarly academic sources, I think we need to do more to acknowledge the marginalization and silencing of certain groups. So our thought on this is, you know, by maybe giving more agency to the students, by empowering students with more information about their creator rights in intellectual property, perhaps we can help to break down these kind of more gatekeeping views of ownership and copyright. So that's kind of our reasoning behind this talk. So I'll pass it over to Jess. Yeah, sure. So in my context, I'm really fortunate in that I get to work with students across multiple program contexts. Over the years, I've started to incorporate more open pedagogical approaches, especially within my assessment practices. And as I've made these switches, I've noticed that the conversation surrounding intellectual property and information literacy is really changing in significant and I think important ways. So I'm watching my learners demonstrate really an ethos of care when it comes to engaging with intellectual works. So for example, I'll invite learners to contribute their capstone final projects to a public facing website. I had a conversation with a student who decided to license their work on this website as all rights reserved. And they told me that they had reached out to a specific organization seeking permission to include their copyrighted logo within the final assignment. As the student was making choices as to how to license this work on the public facing website, they realized that they got permission to use the logo, but others hadn't secured that same permission. So out of respect, the student decided to include an all rights reserved license to protect this organization's copyright identity. And so that's just, I think, one of many powerful examples of the ways that students are thinking carefully and critically about how they engage with copyrighted content. We don't always remember to think about learners as creators, as engagers. We need to think about how we can talk about agency and how to exercise that agency in an explicit way that recognizes that there is an empowerment issue here. So I think for all of us, there's an element of de-schooling that we need to evoke and, you know, I'm quoting Ivan Illich there. So for example, students at my institution often assume that I as their prof or the institution as a whole owns their homework outputs, their intellectual outputs by default. And this just simply isn't true. It's an assumption based on, I'm not sure what, and it demonstrates, I think, a continued need for nuanced conversations about what it means to be a knowledge producer and the rights and responsibilities that lie within that role. So we have responsibilities too. We need to think critically about how our traditional approaches to copyright education and policing of academic integrity impact learners' conceptions of self as creator, engager, passive consumer, suspicious potential cheater. So we're thinking about a copyright guide that comes from a place of empowerment, empowering learners to think critically and to exercise their agency responsibly in a way that respects their own personhood, but also emphasizes the importance of respect and responsibility when engaging with others creative works as well. Yeah. And so what we're that kind of brings us to what we're looking for in a new guide. So again, we we're looking to do something that's kind of more rooted in that emancipatory decolonized, you know, those critical frameworks to get to that point. And as I mentioned, you know, the library, our library has a guide already. I know they're commonplace at a lot of institutions, but certain certainly ours that again, where we're guilty of this. It's it's very focused on the faculty audience and it's primarily concerned with fair dealing and what faculty can can legitimately do in the context of their teaching with with content that they find. So what what I'm what we're hoping that we can get out of this, you know, I don't want to kind of copy work from others that have built these other guides. We want to kind of go beyond that and talk more about greater rights and bring bring in that more inclusive and equitable framework for for intellectual property and that that balance and evaluating information as well. We we really feel that we're going to be asked for more and more guidance for these and, you know, to provide more of these types of guides, especially in the context of of, you know, having a lot of students working on applied research projects or other types of employment scenarios where they might be signing away some of their some of their intellectual property. So we really should be helping students to understand the implications of these contractual decisions. And, you know, just in the college context, we have many students who are content creators and depend on commercializing their content to live and get paid. Students are highly concerned with with their intellectual property, almost surprisingly. So when I reflect on my own knowledge at that age of this topic, again, I think because of the prevalence of social media and content creation in that way, they are very aware of this. And the students have very varied and highly sexual relationships to to licensing and intellectual property kind of growing out of these scenarios. So we really want a guide that, you know, helps us determine how we can help students to read critically, to engage contractually with with employment projects in ways that don't exploit them. Things things like that as well. So when we think about what we mean, when we say we want to build a copyright guide from an emancipatory framework, I think what we're talking about is coming from a place that enters issues of equity, diversity, inclusion, a guide that might challenge explicitly the assumptions baked within our current practices. One might argue the epistemic violence that is rooted in our approach to copyright, academic integrity, and even assessment practices generally. So at this point, we've got way more questions than we have answers, but I think questioning is the right place to start and we need your help. So we're inviting you to join us in a bit of an asynchronous sprint. Marni and I have created a Google doc that you can find at this link. It will be CC by licensed. So feel free to add your name to the list of authors or not. And what we're hoping is that you'll add your thoughts, your questions, helpful resources, guiding quotes, pretty much anything into this document that will help us and maybe help you create or revise your existing student facing copyright guides. Our hope is that by engaging a broad spectrum of collaborators, we can help unsettle some of our own assumptions and default approaches to conversations related to copyright education, digital literacies and the like and maybe raise our own critical consciousness and envision a different path forward. So thank you in advance for your contributions. And thank you very much for your time today.