“Share your knowledge. It is a way to achieve immortality.”
― Dalai Lama XIV
As a teacher, I am a hypocrite. I expect my students to write insightful blog posts about novels, poems, videos, presentations, readings, etc., and to continually share these ideas, yet before OLTD, I did not even attempt to share my thoughts online. This obviously contradiction—do as I say (not as I do)—speaks to my teaching practice that I must change. I’ve come to appreciate that we need to move beyond “educational voyeurism” (Shareski, 2010); where sneaking peeks at others’ writing, and taking the ideas, resources, lessons, etc. that are interesting will no longer suffice—I must begin to give back, not only to my students, but to other educators. Dean Shareski (2010) ardently maintains that sharing is an educator’s “moral imperative.” If it is our moral imperative to share, then perhaps we are obliged to model this behaviour to our students, as well as our colleagues, as it [sharing] is the “entire premise of what education is built,” and it will be of “benefit to all” (Shareski, 2010).
Dean Shareski (2010) declared that he is “a giant derivative,” a statement that is true of most educators. Many of us embark on a daily struggle to find and create interesting and valuable lessons for our students; we scrounge around the bookshelves, ask our colleagues (who are also busy), and search the vast Internet for ideas that will work. On many occasions I have paid a lot of money for packaged resources that occasionally help in this endless endeavor. Thanks to the social renaissance known as the Internet, we benefit from the shared knowledge and creative wealth of other educators and experts in specific fields; we get many of our best ideas from others. Originality, it seems, comes from your spin on the resource—or where you chose to take it, and it is our responsibility to open-up our resources and knowledge for the benefit of others.
What does openness look like for educators? I think that we need to be transparent about our educational practice. One means of doing this is by sharing our experiences in blogs, (see my colleague, Shelley Beleznay’s blog) those that reveal what we are doing in our classroom, both the trials and tribulations and the moments that we relished. As I am a consumer of other’s ideas, I believe educators must share resources and allow others to take and remix theirs, as “every little bit that everyone contributes can be changed and made into something new” (Kooner, 2013). Lastly, we need to embrace this culture of openness and share it with our students—they need to learn that their “insights are worth sharing” (Shareski, 2010), and they need not fear it.