Learning in the Corporate World

One of my jobs at work, is to coordinate the Joondalup Learning Precinct Mentoring program.  Feedback from last years cohort indicated that opportunities for increasing collaboration and networking within and between cohorts would be welcome.

“Wonderful work for a wiki”  I thought

I excitedly have gone and set up my collaborative wiki with wikispaces.  The program started this morning with the first of 3 sessions for the week.  The participants are keen to get their hands wet in their wiki (so to speak).  Given the range of ICT literacy skills, it is apparent that I need to develop a sufficient instruction base to get them up and running.

Unashamedly (after all, why re-invent the wheel?), I asked Good Sue if I could look at her work wikis.  She duely sent off the URL’s to my work Skype (don’t you love getting around that nasty firewall?) and I proceeded to look at the construct of the aforementioned wiki’s.

This evening, I have eagerly sat down, bouyed by the enthusiasm of my participants to build the wiki beyond its current skeletal structure.

I have enjoyed the development (as small as it is) this evening.  The initial steps have been in developing the base instructions for use.  Happily Snagit-ing (is that a word?) away I looked at the work already done by Sue, and thought,

“Why am I spending hours doing this, when its already been done?”

Good Sue has so many wikis, I then started getting lost trying to remember which wiki, which page, which link and which content it was that I really wanted to illustrate my point.

This has raised the question for me of IP, copyright and so forth.  Sue is happy for me to use whatever I want.  I have created a number of acknowledgments on a variety of pages sourcing the work where relevant.  But is it needed?  I am working in the higher education sector at the moment – almost every word has to be referenced.  Copyright and IP infringement in my organisation are not issues taken lightly.  When is enough enough in referencing her?  Do I have to reference her? Does it matter?

I rang Sue and asked with this Web2.0 “stuff” is it ok to just grab what you want from peoples pages, if it’s this ubiquitous learning concept and social networking and sharing.  When is copyright infringement, copyright in Web2.0? Or at all?  I must say, I still feel guilty for poaching her work even though its with permission, and she openly admits to “recycling” work of others with these simple instructions.

Without reading further, these are some basic thoughts that are flying around my head at 10.40pm.  I suspect that sleep will not come easily this evening (dreams of IP and copyright infringement …ahhhh), and that this is a subject I might explore further in another post.   Wikiip? or Wiki-IP?