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cc-education - [cc-education] Can we tag open content?

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Subject: development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

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Chronological Thread  
  • From: Steve Foerster <steve AT chrysology.com>
  • To: cc-education AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [cc-education] Can we tag open content?
  • Date: Thu, 04 Dec 2003 21:57:12 -0500

Stephen wrote:

<< [Locating open content materials] is key, since you can't simply browse hundreds of thousands of resources the way you can browse your hard drive (you can't even browse some hard drives any more, including mine). Thus, an effective search mechanism would be required. >>

One can browse the entire Internet as one would a hard drive using services like DMOZ and Yahoo! If open content is categorized intelligently, I'd think it would be possible to make it all reasonably accessible by drill down.

Perhaps a useful approach would be to designate a set of meta tags that tag its document as open content and specifies which license applies to it? If there also were a recognized categorization scheme that had its own meta tag, then robots could add open content to a directory.

Of course, this approach is HTML centric, but there could be allowances for PDFs, RTFs, Word documents, and other file formats that were available from a page with such tags.


<< The second part is a mechanism to preview items before inserting them
into your document. I don't know what to say about this, really. >>

Since I'm going meta tag crazy, I'll ask whether the description meta tag is useful here as a sort of thumbnail for text? I guess it depends whether you're looking for a specific paragraph or a whole document.


<< The third part is the payoff. Once the user has reviewed the resource, she selects either all or part of it. The resource is then copied directly into the docuemnt in the appropriate format. For example, suppose the user found a text on owls, and located a paragraph worth quoting. She highlights the paragraph and then double-clicks (say). The paragraph is then copied into the document, and a tag or caption is placed into the document identifying the bibliographical information and the creative commons (or equivalent) license information (this latter is key for commercial users, who will not reuse content unless they are certain, and can prove, that they have permission to use the content). >>

I suppose the open content directory that uses a meta tag system could also generate code for use by those publishing modified documents.

"If you use this content in your document, you must add the following HTML code to your document's header:

<meta etc />
<meta blah />"


This is an off the cuff suggestion, so shoot it down, people. :)

-=Steve=-





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