 So I'm hoping that you will kind of act as a focus group for me, because I'm going to ask a lot of questions of you. And I hope you're willing to be open with me. And feel free to put your ideas in the notes. I'm not requiring it by no means. But as I ask these questions, I wonder if you will be open with me as I'm open with you. And as we talk about OER and sharing, I think an important question to ask is why do we share? Why sharing? And I think everybody that's probably at this conference has some experience with sharing. Probably a lot of people here have shared some great things. And I'm wondering really what you have shared. And I wonder really why you share. Maybe I should go out a little bit into why I share. I share personally because I feel like being a person that comes from fortunate circumstances and comparatively across the globe, I feel like I have a moral obligation to help other people. Worked with, I don't know if you guys know Steve Hargadon. He'll be talking to us next, but we were talking earlier today about the Global Education Conference. And this is an online conference that Steve's put together. And last year was the first year. And how many different countries were represented? We were talking about this. Oh, you were talking about a different network. Hundreds of different countries were represented in this conference for free. And I think those in other countries are just starving. They're starving for content. They're starving for educational resources. And I think it's really our job. I think honestly we have a responsibility to help them. Like was mentioned earlier in the keynotes this morning, the president will mention, he will always say we want to be number one. And we do. But I think we should be number one in sharing. And by doing so, we can lift others. So why do I share? I've gained a lot through sharing. I share because I think it's my responsibility. I also share because of this, because it's easy. This is a quote from Dave Cormier. I'm not sure if I'm saying his name right. But he is an early pioneer, Opadette. He said a couple of years ago, he said our blogs are now less megaphone and more like 21st century lockers. And that's been true for me. I've been a portable blogger in the last year or two. But I share on Twitter, I share on blogs, I share on other social networks. And honestly, one of the reasons I share is because it's a place to store my thoughts. It helps me, writing helps me to figure out what I'm thinking. And I can tell you how many times I've gone back to my blog to find stuff that I've written to share with others. So it's been a nice repository. So I'd like to get some feedback from you. And I'd like you to consider, if you wouldn't mind, for about two minutes here. Consider the most meaningful creation you've ever publicly shared. Think about it for a minute. The most meaningful creation, a piece of content, maybe it's a piece of audio, maybe it's a blog or a piece of writing. Maybe it's D106 radio, earlier on, we heard about that. How did you share, why did you share and what impact did sharing have on you and on others? Anybody here to share? Meaningful to me or meaningful to the world? Sure. No, I'm asking you a question. How about meaningful to you? I'm a musician and I've shared stuff through mp3.com and YouTube and things like that. I live in a small community and I don't have the opportunity to share otherwise. So it's been important that way. That's good. Did everybody hear that? I'm sure the musician you shared is music through mp3.com, through other avenues. How did that sharing impact you? I got feedback from the whole world. I have very educated people who gave positive and negative feedback that helped. So that affect future creating? Steve, you rose your hand. I feel like I'm very much a sharer right now. But I can remember that I almost was sort of forced into it. It was my first big community project caused from 2.0 and I ended up taking a job with Ming and because of that I was evangelizing the platform and sort of intriguingly enough, I don't think I would have done that on my own but once I did it, it felt like the benefits to me personally in terms of engagement, my personal engagement. I was so great that I was really grateful for that experience. Awesome, thank you. I think fundamentally as a woman, I'm a mother of two small children and when you have most meaningful creation, they are the most meaningful thing to me right now. But giving my children, you think of labor, how did you share it, and you went through that process. But the why is greater than yourself, giving to the extended family and then the impact is to be seen. I have a 15-month-old and a 3-year-old and it's exciting to me to see what my husband created and how that will impact the world. Fantastic. Is that somebody over here? I wrote a book once and when the copyright lapse I just asked for the, or when the publishing set put out a print and I asked for the rights back and it made the digital version free and then I just recorded myself reading it and put it on iTunes as an audio book and at random moments I'll be, it's a book to teenagers and at random moments I'll be giving a speech to teenagers and someone will come up to me and be like, hey, that story's not your story, I've got great iTunes. Awesome. Thanks a lot. Pleasure to meet you. Hey, what's the name of the book? I lost my phone number, can I have yours? I like that. I've been to the States, you can hear my accent up from somewhere across the waters. I grew up in South Africa and I've been teaching in the United States. So being involved with less commonly taught languages I developed an open site for Africans initially and then realized I really like to do that for all these commonly taught languages. So I created openlanguages.net which specifically goes there. I asked myself that question, why do I invest so much in this and I'm not getting a penny for it that's just open and sharing. And it's actually more of a spiritual thing to me and that is I realize life is short. You've got a mark to be made and that you really want to bless humanity. Do it, don't wait. You're going to be expiring real soon and then you might discover it. And I realize that a time is really short. If you've got something unique that you want to bless humanity with jump on it and share. Don't reserve what I want to make money and so forth. You've got it wrong, it's about money isn't it? And your love for humanity is over this. So I've just been spiritually driven to share what I've got instead of having this, I want to be a millionaire. Life is short, that's the pessimistic view, right? This is the pessimistic crowd. And sure, I think that's fantastic, thank you. Let's do one more right in the back over here. I'm a pretty open person, I share almost everything I do but the most meaningful one was a college lecture that I blogged. And I thought it helped me, well when I helped me do two things. One, I thought about the material more and more and helped me synthesize and actually learn it better. And two, it got my data off my back because it was always pestering me, what are you learning at that college if there was anyone? There you go. Transparency. That's good. So if you didn't get a chance to share yours, you're welcome to share it in the notes. Again, those are public, so be careful what you share and why you, your motives for sharing. Anybody know who this person is? Let's get into some difficult questions now. Anybody know who this person is? It's not George Washington. I think Arnold Jefferson. Arnold? Yes. That is Benedict Arnold. What is the story of Benedict Arnold? So we're talking about the 1700s, right? He was a general in the Colonial Army. He was privy to a lot of inside information. They were open with him. And he took that openness and made them pay. There's one of our questions when it comes to competition. If they, remember they might be, if they have more honor students than we have students, are we really safe to share? I'd like to hear your thoughts on that. It's a competitive world. And, you know, we're in it. It's so competitive now anyway, even here in the United States, right? In education. We've got public education. We've got private education. We've got charter schools fighting for dollars, public dollars. And then here in Utah, if you're not from Utah, you may not be familiar with Senate Bill 65. That's a new bill that came out that said that all public students can now have the option to attend any online Utah online high school or credit. And if they choose to go to another online school, then their local district will need to pay for them to attend. And I think the dollar amounts somewhere at 750 or so, it's the WPU. So their district would lose money for those students that are attending these other schools. So if they have more honor students than we have students, if people are fighting for our money, why should we share? That's one dilemma I think we need to consider. Any comments, thoughts or questions on that? I'll just start a brief one. I'm talking tomorrow, and this is really part of my thing too. The money makers and the for-profit people are well organized and they can pay to do marketing, to hire great content developers and so forth, and to really, the money drives it. And we see ourselves kind of vulnerable. The way that we can do it is by really getting organized. Because as you look at free software, by being organized, you can really do some magic. But if you're not organized, if you divide it, you are very vulnerable. Yes, I agree. It's not Halloween. Again, this is a very deep question. I think it's a spiritual question too. And it has to do with whether we see ourselves as an individual separate from our environment, or if we see ourselves and our organization as a part of something we're doing ourselves. And if we take that latter view, then I believe we will find practical ways to do it, for example what was just mentioned. I think this has been alluded to rather than said, but in a research context, your intellectual property is pretty much leading to the future employed sometimes. So it's very difficult to create a culture in which people feel comfortable giving it away. There's one more up in here. I don't know. I think a lot has to do with developing good institutions and make the whole idea like this common resource work. I mean, if you imagine there's a common grazing old brand, like you're not going to spend all your time making that productive, everyone else is going to reap the benefits. If you have some ways to keep it, I don't know, guaranteed, there's no easy answer. So we've talked a little bit about culture and creating a culture of sharing and how critical that is. I think an important aspect of that culture is the willingness to attribute the work of others. And I think you were alluding to that in the back. When that happens, sharing can be beneficial all around. Well, I don't know why I chose the word safe, except in thinking of Benedict Arnold, not sure how safe it was for them to share information with him, even though they weren't knowing that it would eventually harm them. I think that's a potential roadblock we're going to run into all the time. I'm thinking more about this question, is it safer really to share with our friends or is it safer to share with our enemies or people that we don't even know? In Benedict Arnold's case, I think it was not very safe to share with friends. So it's a tough thing. And I agree that it's a spiritual question. This is one that lies... The answer lies deep within people. It lies deep within the people of our country as an example. If we're going to be number one in sharing, that means a lot. It means we're going to need to change some things. It complicates it too that there are different levels of sharing, right? So if I just blog about what I'm doing in my class, I could come and say, oh, I'm open about what I'm doing, right? But that's very different than taking my actual lesson class, putting those online, or taking those and putting them in a package, doing the actual work to make it usable by other people. They're all these different phases, right? And I think sometimes we get caught up in, oh, do I share or do I not share? Rather than, you know, at what level am I sharing? How much work am I going to put into this and become vulnerable to other people as a result? Good. Back to that. Also with my experience, it's not only a question of teachers it's even students. I have a website that allows students to collaborate on coursework and the primary reason they don't contribute is that they're worried about giving up their competitive advantage. Find it with those notes and I'm going to get an A and I don't want you to get an A as it makes mine less valuable. As a teacher, how important is it to change that mindset? It's really changing culture. It's incredibly difficult to do, but I think it is worthwhile. And then back. And going back to the public comment. So we hear it, it depends on what you share. If you're at a research one and you're going to get a A or not based upon your research, you're not going to be given that A to everyone. But if you're teaching at a $100 course and you create a lesson that you think is pretty cool and you want to share that, you know, it's a different. Good stuff. I was looking at that from a state government perspective. So I was thinking about how we typically don't incentivize collaboration. So there is not really a, there's been more reward, I guess, for competition in some ways and individual outcomes than that happened for collaboration and collective outcome. So this is almost a policy issue too, isn't it? Anyway. There's an emerging question. Is when do you share and when do you compete? And that's not easy to answer. No. Competition is something that can be eliminated in any environment. So maybe we should leave the question and we should start asking ourselves how we can develop an ecosystem in which competing for openness is recognized and evaluated and valued so that actually you can actually compete but for being open and free. That's a great idea. To a certain extent we're already sharing. And if you're college faculty to publish hopefully your work will be either showing up in a database that thousands of millions of libraries will have access to where faculty and students would see your research and cite from it. The other thing is that people, faculty are already publishing online journals which are open access available through any Google scholar search. So this is already sharing. And that's totally free because that's not getting indexed by database companies. So anybody who isn't a paying student or an employee faculty member of the university to access this, there are some conferences, not this one unfortunately, where they archive people's conference presentations. Thank you.