[cc-education] Quick draft
David Wiley
dw2 at opencontent.org
Mon Feb 9 23:17:02 EST 2004
Stephen Downes wrote:
> The research doesn't bear that out. In the only large scale survey
> that I am aware of on this topic, 'educational use only' isn't
> even on the authors' radar screen. Cites:
>
> http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/
> http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/aria-deny-is5-ue36/romeo/
>
> The survey, which interviewed more than 500 archiving and
> non-archiving academics, found that attribution was the
> overwhelming desire of the vast majority. A sizable minority
> also wanted to ensure that the work was not used
> commercially.
>
> After completing the survey, the project recommended
> the following:
>
>> It can be seen that all of the DP and SP’s requirements could be met
>> by the CC licences except ‘by prior agreement’ which could not be met
>> by any automated system. It was therefore decided to recommend the use
>> of CC licences to express rights over metadata as well as rights over
>> resources.
>>
> http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/RoMEO-Rights-solution.doc
>
> The best evidence available, therefore, does not argue
> in favour of a specialized 'educational license'. Quite
> the contrary.
It's nice to finally see some data on this, whether it seems to support
my position or not! Having said that, I have to question the
applicability of the data. ;) The paper opens "The RoMEO Project aimed
to generate some simple rights metadata by which academics might
describe the rights status of their open-access research papers
(eprints)." I do not argue with what the data says at all, but I wonder
how closely a professor's feelings about their "open access research
papers" (when they have always had to sign away copyrights to these
papers in the past) reflect their feelings about their syllabi, lecture
notes, problem sets, animations, and other educational materials (which
they have traditionally held tight, perhaps obsessive, copyright over).
The feeling might be similar, but it might not. I don't think there is
any good reason to believe that public school teachers' attitudes match
those of university professors, so I don't believe the data tell us
anything about them. Finally, these data pretend to tell us nothing
about the group I am most interested in -- the hobby-ists and others who
will create and share intersting educational materials outside the
mainstram academic context.
<snip>
> To reiterate:
>
> - The 'educational institutions only' license is not needed,
> despite speculation to the contrary, and
>
> - Addition of an 'educational institutions only' license
> weakens the concept of Creative Commons as a whole.
Both these objections focus on the 'educational insitutions only' option
in the license. I asked before, but am still very curious to know, if
the removal of that option would make the license draft acceptable to
you. Please let us know.
D
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