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cc-education - Re: [cc-education] Creative Commons 101

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

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  • From: Heather Ford <hford AT csli.stanford.edu>
  • To: cc-education AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [cc-education] Creative Commons 101
  • Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 00:06:21 -0800

Thanks for your response, David. I think that a collaboration would be
really great here.

At 08:14 AM 12/11/2003, you wrote:
Heather Ford wrote:

Back in Johannesburg after an epic journey involving 3 days stuck at JFK
Airport due to snow storms. I have been awake since 2.30am - ah, the joys
of travelling ;)


Glad to hear you're all in one piece!

Thank you :)


I wanted to aggregate our discussions over the past 2 weeks and apply them
to a specific theme: Creative Commons 101. This would be an online tool
that enables educators to share resources and ideas about how to teach
students about the concepts and philosophy of open content. Pretty much an
extension of the discussions that we've been having about how to make it
easier to actually make practical use of CC content - but starting on a
small scale with a particular topic, rather than dealing with how to find
open content throughout the web.


I absolutely think this has to be done. You're right on target. However, I
think we need to nail down the cc.edu license first. It's hard to hoist
the banner and call people to it when we don't know what to write on it. =)

Sure thing - at what stage are we with this? It would be really great to
have a summary of the sticking points if there are any? Who is in charge
etc?


I know that Lessig and Glenn Otis Brown have been teaching a Creative
Commons course at Stanford this year - so it would be useful if one of
them could provide input here - especially with regard to the mode of
teaching i.e. were case studies used? where were these sourced from? what
lessons were learned? did student assignments produce any new knowledge?


I had contacted Larry a few months ago about an (standalone / not
instructor-led) online course in the basics of CC. I think this refining
down to a narrower topic you propose is a better idea.

Great! I will chat to larry about it in the next few weeks.


I was thinking about CC South Africa and wondering how we could form a
partnership with universities around the country that would make maximum
use of students as volunteers. One of the major advantages of housing CC
at a university is that one can leverage student support by teaching a
course and perhaps using assignments as a way of generating new ideas and
actions for CC in a particular country. There is also the opportunity to
share case studies and ideas etc across geographical boundaries to give CC
the global context that it requires in order to be truly successful.
I hope there will be a role for our EduCommons / "sourceforge for
educational materials" project here. From the proposal (for which the
money has turned on!):

"In the second project, “EduCommons,” we will work to facilitate the
sustainable creation of free and open educational materials which can be
distributed and redistributed to support learning in a variety of formal
and informal settings. While there are several projects underway to
facilitate the creation of free and open educational materials (c.f.
MIT/OCW, CMU/OLI), these projects involve the creation of a finite amount
of educational materials given a finite amount of financial support. In
other words, the funds spent on the MIT, CMU, and similar projects
facilitate the creation of a finite amount of materials but no more.

I couldn't agree with you more on this. I also think that, as more and
more materials become available, there will be an even greater need for
people to find ways of filtering this data into relevant resources - a set
of distributed tools as you suggest would be much more sustainable as you
say.

If it were possible to spend a finite amount of funding on a project
which would facilitate the creation of free and open educational materials
in perpetuity, such a project would be truly sustainable. We believe that
if granting agencies such as the Hewlett Foundation are to achieve the
educational impact they desire to achieve, they must move beyond the “pay
a fixed amount, get a fixed amount” model of supporting educational
materials creation."

Later today my blog will have the job descriptions for the two additional
fulltime software engineers we're hiring to actually build this thing
(total of three plus a UI designer). We're also taking advantage of our
university connections, with a research team of PhD students driving
research, requirements, and evaluation for the engineering team.


So what I propose is a website and accompanying mailing lists that have
the following facilities:
1. Users/curriculum developers sign up as authors and develop personal
profiles detailing: country, institution, reasons for joining, personal
interest, experience (subject/discipline), links to personal websites
etc., rating according to number of times the author has a) downloaded b)
uploaded material etc (lurker, weed, guru etc)

- note: each entry would be linked to other individuals with the same
entries eg if the author enters South Africa as her country of residence,
then they could find all other authors from South Africa (Friendster model)

2. Authors contribute case studies consisting of: legal reports, news
stories/blog entries, images, cartoons, audio, video, multimedia licensed
under open content (authors must upload these resources giving full
license/author details as well as short descriptions/summaries of
materials to enable extensive metadata with which to search) - case
studies can be edited and updated by others when they re-use (wikis?) ALSO
fact sheets with information about a particular country's Internet
penetration (perhaps classified as 'high', medium, low so that authors can
join collaborative groups according to access levels)

- note: is there a way that we can use the openoffice tool to produce,
edit and update these docs?

3. Teaching tips - authors share stories of: 'what works and doesn't work'
in different learning environments (blog format?)

4. Assignments - authors share examples of assignments that maximise the
student providing useful, practical insight/action for the open content
movement (perhaps choosing from a consistently updated 'to do' list)

- note: there is also the opportunity to get students to partner with one
another for a truly multidisciplinary approach to student assignments -
students could partner up (within a class or even in other
countries/regions) to produce material e.g. a graphic design student could
partner with a law student to produce an animated video describing how the
licenses work to an audience of musicians - you could even make this a
random assignment where you choose: theme, audience and product to get the
name of your assignment

5. Search by: keyword, country, internet penetration group, resource
(image, multimedia, fact sheet, case study etc), discipline (law, social
science, music, journalism etc)

4. Mailing list to alert authors to new resources, changes to their
documents etc

5. Mailing list to discuss progress of the project and ideas for
collaboration (eg volunteer sharing)

6. Opportunity for authors to host mailing lists according to new subjects
eg Teaching Creative Commons in an Anthropology class, or Teaching
Creative Commons to music students etc

7. Links to cc education mailing list

(Mailing lists would link to author IDs so that users could go directly to
the website to find out more about authors of posts and put their ideas in
a particular context - better than having to do your own ineffective
investigations about authors when you join a list)

The project would aim to build a *community* around the cc education
license and to stimulate active engagement in the development of open
content ideas on a global scale.
Once a model has been developed, it could be applied to other subjects or
multi-disciplinary learning areas.
So, what do you all think? This probably can't all be done at once but it
would be useful to hear which - if any - are the better ideas.


I'm going to pass this list on to the research team for use in creating
the requirements. We're trying to close requirements by the end of
January, and will be holding a meeting with interested parties here in
Logan to do a focus group-style meeting over a near final draft
requirements document. Would you be interested in attending sometime in
mid to late January?

Would love to - I think that it would be great to collaborate on this -
will mention it at the Idlelo Open Source Conference in Cape Town in
January. I'll be back in California on the 18th of January.

H.


D

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Heather Ford






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