This post looks at the ideas and business models that are working within open education, and builds on discussions with the wider ELT community on ways to deal with access, copyright and materials writing/development.
Over the last couple of years, the blog has covered a lot of topics of interest to ELT authors so we thought it might be useful to look back at them and collect them all in one place.
Looking back at the blog over the past year we can see we’ve had some fantastic people contributing posts and comments. It’s really interesting to see which posts got the most views, sparked the most debate and kickstarted conversations that resulted in fully-fledged follow up posts. This Top Five shows we really couldn’t run the blog without all of you, so a big thanks to everyone and here’s a look at the biggest posts
If you haven’t already read Nick Robinson’s excellent post on ELTjam about book piracy and the lively conversation it’s started, go check it out. To sum it up, just about every ELT textbook that’s ever been published (including mine) have been ripped off by pirates and put on innumerable free PDF download sites all over the Internet. The conversation has branched off in many directions: Is piracy really that bad? Is copyright law generally a moral thing? Are authors totally screwed? And so on. One thing I think hasn’t been addressed fully is what we can do to limit piracy or make it work for us. Expanding on suggestions I’ve made in comments on the original post, why can’t some of these things be done?
On the 9th June 2014, the following exchange was posted by a well-known ELT author in the ELT Writers Connected Facebook group. I’ve reproduced it here with his full permission, although he has asked to remain anonymous. It is a conversation with the manager of a blog that had been making copies of the author’s book available for illegal download.
Author: Am I right in thinking that you manage this site? If so please remove the illegal version of my book [REDACTED] from it.
Pirate: lol
Author: That’s your reaction?
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