Ccedu

It’s a much better name than cc.edu: Creative Commons is seeking an Executive Director for CC Learn, a new division that will focus on education, broadly defined — from kindergarten to graduate school, to lifelong learning. The mission of this new division will be to promote vigorous networks of Open Educational Resources: materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use, modify and re-use for teaching, learning and research. ...

Preface: You will please notice that this is neither a “the NC clause is evil” post nor an “MIT OCW is evil” post. If you were hoping for either of those, then ‘these aren’t the droids you’re looking for - you can go about your business; move along.’ In doing some research for a book chapter I’m writing, I came across the following oddity: CC and MIT OCW have diametrically opposed interpretations of the meaning of the NC clause of CC’s own licenses. ...

So, I’m working on making the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license easier for people to understand as part of my fellowship at CIS. I’d appreciate your thoughts on the following language. Once we get the language right, we’ll be adding visuals. Educators are sharers by nature - the very essence of teaching is sharing what we know with others. And while none of us has the time to work with as many students as we wish we could, the Internet affords us an incredible opportunity to share our educational materials with as many people as are interested. ...

Back in August of 2003 I proposed that rather than create a new education license, we rebrand the By-NC-SA license as the cc.edu. The idea had lots of traction on the list - Stephen even agreed eventually ;) - as did many others (see August - December 2003 posts). However, because of some push back from CC about rebranding as a strategy, the discussion moved another direction and to the frustration of many eventually fizzled out. ...

We’re currently voting on what should go into the draft license which will be launched as the public beta. We’d love your feedback - please leave comments with clear yeas or neas to the proposed license options below by 10:00 MST Friday. ...

Here are the results of the survey on “what would ‘free for educational use’ mean to you?” There were fifteen (15) responses I could interpret. I did not respond. I counted answers like “possibly” as a yes vote, and those like “probably not” as a no vote. If you care to, you can check the data from the comments and trackback section of my blog. Spoiler: we’re back to where we started. ...

If you were given some curriculum materials and told that the were licensed free for “educational use,” which of the following would you interpret that to mean: a) that you would need to provide some reference or “give credit” to the materials’ creator, and/or b) that any changes you made to the materials needed to be shared freely with others, and/or c) that the materials were not to be used commercially, and/or d) that the materials should only be used in the context of a formal educational institution (e.g., not to be used for self-study by individuals not enrolled as students in a formal school), and/or e) that the materials are only to be used for educational or research purposes. ...