Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Give Away Intellectual Property

Last week I was contacted by another teacher in my county. One of my students moved, switched schools, and was now in her class. Apparently when she asked him where they were in history, he showed her his notes and she was impressed. I've spent the last year and a half created an outline of each section in our US History book. Then she asked if I would mind sending her a copy of the notes (without paying I assumed). In that split second I had to make a decision and I've spent the last week deciding whether it was the right one. I gave her the notes.

Last year I worked 60 hours a week preparing them and for someone to just get them with one email somehow violated my sense of justice. Yet, just like me, she a women with scarce time. If production is the key to wealth, then hopefully I just made a lot of people better off. Instead of going through each section and creating an outline, now this teacher can work on other educational projects, spend more time with her own children, or in the least catch up on Lost before it returns. Here's the most important part, I have increased her wealth with almost no decrease anywhere else. So what do you think, did I make the right decision?

8 comments:

  1. Is this other teacher someone who can trade back? Personally, I share anything and everything with a few other speech friends who do the same in return. For those who I don't have that relationship with, I'll share whatever they immediately need help with, but I don't hand over everything I've worked hard to accumulate. Maybe that's cheap of me, but my time is valuable too. All to say, you're very generous.

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  2. I had to do the exact same thing when I started teaching too. I was amazed at how other teachers wouldn't help me out. I still don't know if it's just that they don't have the notes/outlines, or if they're not willing to share. Do you post your outlines online for your students? I'm afraid that my school is going to start forcing us to do that.

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  3. I think that it depends on your goal: If your goal as a teacher is to help students in general, not just your own, then I think you made the right call. Sure, it's annoying to think about all of that work that someone else doesn't have to do, but you have also given the other teacher's students the opportunity to better understand their material. I personally think that you made the right choice.

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  4. Educators unite! Thanks for you thoughts guys and gals.

    The other teacher probably has nothing worthwhile, but I did mention that if she ever some across anything interesting to send it my way.

    I also ran into a lot of trouble with teachers not helping me in the beginning. I'm working on created a part of my homepage that can give access students/teachers to my outlines.

    The conclusion I've come to is that if/when teachers share their stuff, it increase overall production of education. Helping students learn more and maybe encouraging more teachers to be givers.

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  5. Altruism ftw. Might not make a whole lot of sense in nature, but with our highly evolved social structures it can make a lot of sense.

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  6. I think you did the right thing by answering our call to generosity.

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  7. From an economics point of view, the transaction increased the wealth of the society. It's too bad you weren't able to capture more of the value for yourself because if you could then it would incentivize you to produce more!

    It should be possible to leverage technology in order to make it easier to capture some value from this kind of transaction, and cheaper to coordinate people who want to transact. There MUST already be some web service for this, right?

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  8. That exactly what I was thinking Robert, society is better off. As for me capturing value, selfishly that would have been nice, but I don't think it will effect my overall output (because I need it for my job).

    As for a web service that already does this, I linked to one in the body of the post, here it is: http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/

    Thanks for the comment Robert.

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You are the reason why I do not write privately. I would love to hear your thoughts, whether you agree or not.