Reflection 3

Week 5 changed how I think about copyright and open education way more than I expected.

I knew copyright existed obviously, but I had not really thought that much about how it affects students in such practical ways. Cable Green’s talk made that feel way more real because he was not talking about copyright in a vague legal way. He was talking about students getting pushed out of classes because textbooks cost too much. That part honestly stuck with me a lot. It is easy to treat textbook costs like a normal annoying part of university, but when he explained how even one expensive textbook can delay someone’s graduation or make school harder to continue, it made open education feel way less abstract. 

What I also found interesting was the distinction between something being online and something being openly licensed. I think a lot of people, including me before this, kind of blur those together. Like if it is on the internet, it feels public. But that does not actually mean you are allowed to reuse it, remix it, or build on it. That is what made Creative Commons and open licensing make more sense to me. It is a way of legally sharing knowledge so that people can actually use it ethically and clearly. That seems really important now when so much digital content gets copied, reposted, screenshotted, and passed around constantly. 

I also liked the part of Cable Green’s talk where he pushed back on the idea that education should stay locked behind paywalls when public money often helped produce the knowledge in the first place. That made me think more about what fairness means in digital spaces. If research or learning resources are funded publicly, it feels strange that access can still be so restricted. I do not think I had fully connected digital literacy with those bigger systems before. I usually think of literacy as a personal skill, but this week made me realize it is also about understanding the structures around information. Who gets access, who gets excluded, and who benefits when knowledge stays closed.

Overall, this week made digital literacy feel more tied to ethics and access than I had thought before. It is not just about being able to find information online. It is also about understanding who owns it, what fair sharing looks like, and why open access can actually matter in people’s real lives instead of just being some idealistic idea.