Spanish inquisition

Do you agree that it's important to be acknowledged for the work you have done? I find it particularly rewarding when someone else finds my work useful enough to retweet it on Twitter, or better still write a blog post about it. Linking back to my blog or giving me a name check is all the reward I need. I'm a simple soul. I give my stuff away free, papers, slideshows, images, because I believe in the value of 'share and share alike'. I fully support the ethos of open scholarship and think the world would be a better place if all academic ideas were free and didn't need to be paid for. But that is too idealist for some perhaps. I don't mind other people using my ideas and work as long as they acknowledge where it came from. I'm also open to constructive criticism too, so I can improve things if I need to.

I am particularly proud of some of the "teaching with Twitter" uses I have developed - 'Lingua Tweeta', 'Twitterstalking' and 'Micro-Write' (See Teaching with Twitter from earlier this year). They give description to language tandems and other learner centred activities which can be supported by Twitter. It's easy to use the terms to track other blog posts about these and allied Twitter teaching uses I described in that blog post. One Spanish blog called Clarión recently carried some commentary about my ideas (which were translated into Spanish) and cited the link back to my original post. Clarión's post was subsequently reported by several other blogs in the Spanish speaking world and elsewhere. Unfortunately though, none of them acknowledged the original source. I guess this is the point I start getting a little aeriated. I have also seen slideshows listing my 10 Twitter Teaching ideas without citing the original source. Perhaps I'm wrong, but doesn't this constitute some kind of plagiarism? If my students used a whole list of ideas without citing the source it would be deemed as such. On a blog shouldn't it be the same?

I don't know whether to feel flattered that others have found my ideas so useful they have decided to list them on their blogs and slideshows, or annoyed because they overlooked the original source. You see, as others copy the list across onto their blogs, so my original efforts gain visibility, but my intellectual property rights are increasingly buried. This might sound petty, but I have gone as far as to post comments on some of these blogs thanking the blog owner for finding my ideas useful, and then suggesting politely that they might wish to acknowledge the source. But.... am I being too precious about this? Or do I have a point? Maybe once I have posted an idea to my blog I lose the right to ownership of that idea? And what about intellectual property? Have others had a similar issue with other bloggers using their ideas without acknowledging them? Maybe others could discuss this in more detail. Perhaps I'm too close to the issue to be fully objective.... and after all, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

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