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cc-education - Re: [cc-education] WHY EDU ?

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

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  • From: David Wiley <dw2 AT opencontent.org>
  • To: development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons <cc-education AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-education] WHY EDU ?
  • Date: Mon, 09 Feb 2004 22:34:22 -0700

email AT greglondon.com wrote:

And those contributions won't be going into a public commons, they'll be going into a much SMALLER,
"education only" pasture, where people can only
use works for educational purposes and only students
and teachers will likely make any contributions to the works.

Yes, it is clear to everyone that works licensed this way go not into the public domain, and not into the smaller "creative commons" but into a smaller "educational commons." And these works will only be available for educational use, but I would challenge your assumption that only teachers and students (by these terms I assume you mean those attached to traditional schools) will contribute. Of course, this is only my personal conjecture. ;)

Do you not see the cost of doing this will likely mean most works will be vanity works?
Works contributed by a professor, used in his/her class only, with typos / improvements
only to be contributed by his/her students?

(You seem to be assuming that everyone will invoke the formal education option. If you're not assuming this please let us know, but this is the only way I can make sense of your argument.)

I don't see this. Having run the OpenContent project for five years, I remember seeing lots of educational material created by people who weren't teachers or students at schools. When the "open education license" is used, anyone who wants to learn is counted an educational user. More on this below.

You are cutting off the majority of teh population
that would benefit from these works and therefore
you are cutting off that population from making
any CONTRIBUTIONS to those works that would BENEFIT
those works.

Unless you either (1) assume the formal education connection, or (2) assume that the majority of the population wants to make commercial or non-learning related uses of the materials, I disagree.

A simple CC-BY-SA license allows EVERYONE access
to the work. And everyone benefits from using the
work, meaning ANYONE could be a likely contributor
TO the work to improve it. An education only license
takes "everyone" and reduces to a tiny fraction of it.

Only if you assume as above.

If the only real excuse for the education only license is its easier to convince teachers to
contribute works under such a license, then the time and energy spent coming up with an education-only license would be better spent,
in the long run, on EDUCATING THE TEACHERS so they understand that the benefit of a public
commons only comes when the entire public can
use and contribute to the works, not just a small
minority.

To get their attention we need a banner we can hoist and wave. "CC-By-SA" is not the banner that my elementary school teachers at Davis Creek Elementary will flock to. I doubt that many university types would com to it. It needs to be specific to education.

My perl training manual is CC-BY-SA. Anyone can use it. If everyone can use it, the potential
for fixes and contributions to improve it are
far better than if I limit it to CC-BY-TeachersOnly
or something similar. If a company decides to offer print-on-demand books of my manual, don't
you think they'd want it to be the best possible
manual? And any changes they make to it would still
be licensed under CC-BY-SA, still in the public
commons. Non-educational uses will not take a sharealike work out of the commons. Commercial
uses will not take a sharealike work out of the
commons.

The CC-By-TeachersStudentsOthersAffiliatedWithaSchoolOnly is an option, and not even the default option at that. It seems that there is a large assumption that everyone is going to choose it. I don't think they will.

D




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