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  • From: "Melissa Reeder" <melissa AT creativecommons.org>
  • To: cc-info AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [cc-info] ccNewsletter #10 - ccLearn
  • Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2008 14:39:57 -0800

Dear Creative Commoner,

This month's newsletter focuses on ccLearn, CC's "newest" project (even though it's almost 2 years old) dedicated to championing the CC infrastructure within education, followed by brief updates from the people on the front lines of Science Commons, Creative Commons International (CCi), Culture Commons, and CC Core. Education as we know it is evolving, and as it changes we need to make sure that it remains open and free and interoperable. ccLearn was made possible thanks to the generosity of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, one of the leaders in open educational resources (OER). I don't want to say too much though; I don't want to spoil what is explained so eloquently below.

Over the past 8 months I've brought you information about CCi, Science Commons, Culture Commons, CC Core (Development), and now ccLearn. All of these projects have one thing in common—the CC "Core" infrastructure (legal, technology, and operations). As you probably know, we're in the middle of our annual fundraiser. We need to raise $500,000 by December 31st and we have $260,000 left to go. If you've already given to the campaign—THANK YOU. Your support is more appreciated than you know. But you can still help. Tell your friends and family about CC and encourage them to give. Blog about the campaign and encourage your readers to participate. Spread the word about CC and our need for support as far and wide as humanly possible. By supporting CC you will be sustaining this vital infrastructure.

As you read, you will notice the difference between this newsletter and past editions. We're experimenting with a new format, which I think is more informative and effective, and would like to hear what you think. We here at CC are open to community feedback and suggestions. We're writing this so you have an easy alternative way to stay informed; please let us know what you think by emailing development AT creativecommons.org

All the best,

Melissa Reeder
Development Manager

p.s. The beautifully designed PDF version of this newsletter (thanks to CC Philippines project leads) is here: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CCNewsletter

ccLearn
Ahrash Bissel,  Executive Director, ccLearn

What does the future of education look like?

  • Compelling lessons on the history of human migration available, for free, in eighty different languages.

  • Free multimedia presentations on the chemistry of volcanoes enthralling children all over the United States, whether or not they are actually in school.

  • Health care instructors in Africa, Europe, and elsewhere collaborating virtually to adapt medical school curricula to the specific needs of their students, improving both the quality and relevance of instruction in their own countries.

What makes these visions of the future possible? Open licensing.

We already know that Creative Commons makes it possible for people to share their works with the world under generous terms – to allow copies, translations, remixes, and other adaptations to be made and distributed freely. For authors, photographers, musicians, artists, and other creators, Creative Commons licenses have transformed the working landscape and galvanized creative communities worldwide.

But what about communities where sharing is already standard practice? What about in education, where the materials and insights produced by teachers and curriculum developers are usually intended to be adapted as needed to foster the best learning experiences possible? Here, it would seem that the rights granted by Creative Commons – rights to share, adapt, and improve educational resources – are well-matched by community practices that have existed for a long time. And indeed, this is so – most educators around the world agree that their primary intent in creating teaching and learning resources is for them to have a positive impact on student learning, and they therefore tend to share those resources freely with their colleagues. This culture of sharing that already pervades the educational domain has given rise to a movement – the open education movement – which seeks to realize a global learning commons, built on a pool of open educational resources (OER) which are available for anyone to use and adapt as they see fit.

But the stories described above do not yet happen so easily... Even if appropriate hardware and Internet access are available, we already know that just because something can be shared online does not make it legal to do so. Many people have suffered the consequences of this mismatch when they have tried to share music online, for example. In education, the challenge is to build a truly global learning commons, which requires a great degree of standardization or harmonization at the legal, technical, and social levels. In addition, there are many concerns specific to education, such as adherence to state-level standards, attention to quality-control mechanisms, and facilitation of local creation and adaptation of OER.

These varied and complex concerns are the context in which ccLearn, the education division of Creative Commons, was founded just over one year ago. ccLearn is dedicated to supporting the growth and impact of open learning and open educational resources. Our mission is to minimize barriers to the creation, sharing, and reuse of educational materials—legal barriers, technical barriers, and social barriers.

How we are overcoming these barriers---

License Mapping Report

Legal barriers include the use of restrictive or incompatible licenses, which hinder the ability to access, modify, and share content in educational settings. We are analyzing the licensing "landscape" for open education, to be released as a report to the global open education community. The goal is to provide objective data about the extent to which license proliferation is actually a problem, and also insights into the extent to which the learning commons we are trying to build is fractured by incompatible licensing policies.

Universal Education Search

Technical barriers focus on the fact that open educational resources must be easy to find and access in order to be useful. For instance, many OER repositories were built in such a way that their content is inaccessible or difficult to use. ccLearn is benefiting from the amazing engineering work of the Creative Commons team by providing leadership on technical standards and architectures that have the potential to solve these problems. Specifically, we are helping people to understand how the semantic web, through RDFa (and ccREL) mark-up, enables the pool of OER to grow organically and to retain the site-specific properties that make them valuable and educationally relevant. This work stands in contrast to most efforts in this area, which either seek to create a global centralized repository or a semblance of one through direct integration of existing OER silos.

Because these ideas are fairly abstract, we have undertaken to build a proof-of-concept search engine, which we are calling Universal Education Search (UES). We hope this tool will help people to see the benefits of semantic mark-up and of open licensing. If all goes well, we will have a public release of a beta version of UES before the end of the year.

Open Education Community Site

Social barriers require that we recognize that OER development and access are only the first steps. Because Creative Commons licenses are fundamental infrastructural elements of most OER, ccLearn is naturally positioned to serve as a sort of "switchboard" and catalyst for the rest of the community, especially on an international scale. In that vein, we are currently building an "Open Education Community" site which will enable OER projects to share information and collaborate much more easily. In addition, the site will showcase the various tools and resources that we and others have created. Finally, the site will serve as a landing pad for people who are interested in learning more about the open education movement.

Reflecting on the past year: Though the fruits of our efforts are not yet widely visible, I am pleased to report that we have made excellent progress on many fronts. We are near completion on several projects and have laid the groundwork for significant advances in other areas. On a personal level, I have been amazed at the passion, drive, and competence of this global community, which is growing every day. We all share a vision of a future where educational opportunities are not limited by place, time, circumstances of birth, or even by technologies. Clearly, we are some distance yet from achieving this vision, but already there is good evidence that existing inequities in educational access and quality are eroding. It's definitely an exciting time.

Open Education Highlights from around the Globe

The OER movement is a global movement. Education is an issue that crosses borders and spans continents; open education—the creation and distribution of OER—empowers people in a global dialogue. The success of this international effort depends on a great deal, as many issues and barriers to open education are country- and culture-specific. However, despite contextual differences, significant progress has been made around the world. Some specific project highlights of the year:

Latin America

Latam Commons 2008: The Public Domain, Creative Commons, and Open Education in Latin America, held Nov 19-21 in Santiago, Chile, was a great success. The event was co-hosted and excellently managed by the Non-Governmental Organization Derechos Digitales, and representatives from all over Latin America were present and actively participated in the meeting. Project Leads of Creative Commons jurisdictions first held a one-day meeting to discuss their projects, possible strategic initiatives and collaborations across the region, and shared challenges. These conversations are just the beginning of what is planned to become a regular regional gathering to leverage the expertise and resources that are distributed throughout the region. The next day was devoted to a highly interactive "unconference" on open education which brought together leading international advocates for open education with key figures in libraries and ministries of education in Chile and beyond. The goal of the meeting was to gather information regarding top concerns and key projects involved in the growth of the open education movement, to be synthesized and then leveraged for collaborative opportunities both within and beyond the region. Look for a report on this event in the coming months. Finally, Derechos Digitales orchestrated a seminar on the public domain which included cutting-edge research reports and discussions regarding the legal and practical elements of both defining and utilizing the public domain in Latin America. The philosophical and legal issues pertinent to consideration of the public domain is clearly of broad interest in the region, and we are hopeful that these ideas will continue to serve as organizing themes for ongoing conversation and action to enhance access to knowledge and improved scholarship in the future.

New Zealand
New Zealand is the home of Otago Polytechnic, whose default intellectual property policy blasted them onto the OER map last year. All work created by the university and its members are automatically available to the world via CC BY, the most open license and ideally suited for educational purposes. CC BY allows you to freely distribute, derive and adapt the work as long as you credit the authors, making it easy to reuse and re-mix educational works. We hope that more institutions will follow Otago's lead and enact similar policies. Leigh Blackall, at the Education Development Center of Otago, shares our view: "I think everyone will come to see the simplicity and flexibility of CC BY, and that alone outweighs all other concerns."

Europe
We have very strong connections in Europe, two of which are eIFL and Bloomsbury Academic. eIFL.net, Electronic Information for Libraries, is a giant component of the international effort, as it consists of a "network of 2,220 libraries in 47 transitioning and developing countries with a combined population of 800 million people." Though it is based in Europe, it is not limited to European countries. Back in May, eIFL voiced their commitment to the goal of "[creating] a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge." "Through the eIFL OA (Open Access) Program, eIFL members build capacity of the issues related to OA to enable members to benefit from the content, which is made freely available through OA, as well as ensuring that the local content produced within their countries is widely distributed."

Bloomsbury Academic was recently featured in our interview with Frances Pinter. Launched back in September, it is the new imprint by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, publisher of the Harry Potter series, based in London. Bloomsbury Academic will publish works in the Humanities and Social Sciences exclusively under non-commercial CC licenses, some with additional permissions to use in certain commercial contexts. They chose CC licenses because "Creative Commons is the best known license for this kind of publishing. There are still some issues with it, such as defining very precisely what is 'commercial'. However, we felt that on balance it was best to go with a license that had such wide recognition. One reason for putting the whole text online free of charge is to avoid all the fuss and confusion that arises when publishers allow odd excerpts online and free downloads for limited periods etc. This may be good PR, but better to have a policy that is more focused on delivering what authors and readers want – which is to use the Web as a library. This is especially true of academic works."



Recent highlights from CC's other programs:

CC Core


Annual Fundraising Campaign continues: corporate matching challenges; giveaways
Safe Creative and WikiHow both issued corporate matching challenges in support of our 2008 campaign, and we're proud to say that we met both challenges ahead of schedule, resulting in very generous donations from Safe Creative, $4000, and WikiHow, $3000. We are grateful for these and all our corporate donors, whose support helps sustain our organization. This year's fundraising campaign has also garnered exemplary support from CC founder, Lawrence Lessig, who has offered autographed copies of his latest book, REMIX, for donors giving $500 and above, and CC-licensing musician Jonathan Coulton, who has teamed up with us to offer his unreleased (CC-licensed) album on customized USB flash drives to our donors who give $50 and above. We weren't prepared for how popular the flash drives would be and ran out of our first batch in less than three days, but we quickly ordered more. Supplies are very limited, so donate soon if you would like to receive one.

Huge Milestone: Free Software Foundation releases Free Documentation License 1.3

The Free Software Foundation has just released version 1.3 of its Free Documentation License (FDL) containing language which allows FDL-licensed wikis to republish FDL content under the CC Attribution-ShareAlike license until August 1, 2009. Excepted from this are FDL documents originating elsewhere unless they have been incorporated into the wiki prior to November 1, 2008. Why is this news important? First and foremost, this is a crucial step toward de-fracturing the world of free culture and free software, which should have the impact of greatly accelerating the growth of that world. The next step will be for the Wikipedia/Wikimedia community (and other FDL-licensed wikis) to decide to offer wiki content under CC BY-SA 3.0, which we hope to see someday soon.

SSRC awards grant for CC license research

We're thrilled to announce that the Social Science Research Center (SSRC) has awarded CC with a grant for the project "Assessing the Commons: Social Metrics for the New Media Landscape." Thanks to the SSRC, George Cheliotis, of CC Singapore and the National University of Singapore, will work with Creative Commons to research the "global patterns of CC license use, as well as developing metrics showing penetration and impact of open licensing, per jurisdiction and globally."


Science Commons

NeuroCommons RDF distribution and release of the installer:
This is exciting news for NeuroCommons because it is a prototype of a modular scientific knowledge base built on web standards and open data, the first system of its kind (of which we're aware). The inspiration is GNU/Linux distributions such as Debian, which consist of a large number of open software packages that interconnect using a shared set of interfaces; in the case of Science Commons, they have a distribution of open data packages interconnected using a shared set of formal terminologies ("ontologies"). Using this distribution you can build your own knowledge base for molecular biology and biomedicine for personal, lab-wide, or internet-wide use. This is a first step toward scalable practices for making reuseable "data mashups" that would eventually cover all of science. The installer project started about a year ago, and was released in September. The data packages themselves have been in the works for almost two years, and are under steady development.

This project is significant because it carries CC work on the legal and technical aspects of sharing and mashups into a scientific domain. Even after solving the problem of access to data, there still remains the problem of using it. As it stands, data integration is widely acknowledged to be an enormous source of inefficiency in the research cycle, and any contributions or improvements we make have great potential to make the world a better place. Visit www.neurocommons.org for more information.

Upcoming release of CC0 Waiver
We are pleased that CC0 (CC Zero), currently in its third beta, is on track to be released by the end of the year. CC0 was conceived over two years ago, beginning with the Science Commons Open Data conference at the National Academies in Washington, D.C. That journey has since taken members of our team to the Sorbonne, Paris, where they gathered members of the CC community alongside leading legal and scientific experts to discuss the problem of data sharing. From that discussion emerged the idea that would eventually become CC0. CC0 is a protocol that enables people to waive to the fullest extent possible under applicable copyright law all rights they have and associate with a work so it has no (or minimal) copyright or neighboring rights restrictions attached to it. To the extent the waiver is not legally effective in any jurisdiction, then the protocol takes the form of a nonexclusive worldwide license to exercise all copyright and neighboring legal rights in the work. Specifically, CC0 is a tool targeted at scientific data sharing. Factual data in databases are covered by many conflicting and confusing copyright regimes throughout the world. Even lawyers have a hard time reconciling all these laws. With CC0, we will make it simple. CC0 returns data to the public domain and makes it "safe for science"-- that is, free of restrictive copyrights, contracts, and other IP that restrict sharing and reuse of data. Stay tuned for more news on the launch of CC0.


CC International (CCi)


Two new CC jurisdictions launched; more in the works!
Creative Commons and CCi proudly announce the launch of ported CC licenses in Guatemala on October 23 and Hong Kong on October 25, neither of which would have been possible without the dedicated hard work of local Project Leads and volunteers. In another part of the world, Jordan continues to discuss its license draft, the first Version 3.0 draft available in Arabic. You can follow the discussion here: www.creativecommons.org/international/jo. You can also contribute your own ideas, read discussion archives, and get updates by visiting: http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-jo/. In related news, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia continue to surpass the call of duty in preparing to bring CC licenses to their jurisdictions. Thanks to the generous support of the Eurasia Partnership Foundation (EPF), Project Leads from the three jurisdictions came together in October with EPF representatives and CC Serbia's Legal Project Lead, Nena Antic, in Tbilisi, Georgia for a workshop to discuss the CCi license porting process in their jurisdictions.

International conference brings together Free Culture, Free Software, and Free Content
Creative Commons Sweden, Free Software Foundation Europe, and Wikimedia Sverige joined forces under the banner of "Free Society" at the Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit (FSCONS) in Götheborg, Sweden in September to build ties and bridge projects among their respective communities.

Creative Commons and COMMUNIA, a growing European network
COMMUNIA, the European Thematic Network on the Digital Public Domain, funded by the European Commission, is greatly helping to increase awareness of Creative Commons throughout Europe. At a workshop in Amsterdam in October, attendees explored the theme Marking the public domain: relinquishment & certification, and the CC0 beta/discussion draft 3 (see section: Science Commons) was one of the main items on the agenda. We are also thrilled to announce that COMMUNIA will host its first workshop of 2009 on January 23 with the European Broadcasting Union, bringing together many of the major European public broadcasters to talk about how to implement alternative licensing schemes, especially CC.

Al Jazeera and Creative Commons: groundbreaking event set for 2009

Creative Commons is organizing, together with Al Jazeera satellite channel, a special CC-Al Jazeera day on the 14th of March 2009. The event will be followed by the Al Jazeera Forum, on the 15-16 of March, an annual gathering of more than 500 journalists and media experts coming from all over the world to Doha, Qatar.

CC Salons continue to pop up around the globe
We are delighted to announce that CC Austria and CC France each hosted their first salons in October, bringing together members of their respective communities to talk about CC licenses and the shift towards openness and sharing. Watch for more salons to come, and remember - anyone can start a CC Salon, no matter where you live! Check out our resources for starting a salon in your region: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Salon

CC and pop music in Romania
Hi-Q, the hugely successful Romanian pop group, announced the first CC remix competition in Romania. Hi-Q's unreleased song "Eu+Tu=Iubire" ("Me+U=Love") will be included on the band's upcoming album.


Culture Commons

U.S. President-elect Barack Obama CC-licenses election night photos on Flickr
Barack Obama and his staff have posted photographs to his Flickr photostream since early 2007, and their most recent set from election night, November 4th, offers an incredible behind the scenes look at a historic point in American history. All of the photos are released under a CC BY-NC-SA license, making it easy for anyone to share and reuse.

CC licensing encourages openness, sharing, and innovation in the cultural realm
Culture Commons focuses most of its energy on encouraging content platforms and organizations to properly implement and adopt Creative Commons licenses. The result: myriad gratifying examples of bottom-up CC usage that enable any and everybody to successfully achieve proper CC integration, creating a baseline feature for future development of communities and laying the necessary groundwork for another potential Flickr or Wikipedia to come along. Here are some recent fruits of Culture Commons' labor:

"The Concert," a classical music podcast produced by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (ISGM) and released under a Creative Commons Music Sharing license, reached its 54th episode and 1 millionth download in October. While the content of the podcast - lush arrangements of beautiful compositions - is at the heart of why "The Concert" has done so well, the Music Sharing license employed by ISGM makes that content immediately sharable by stripping away legal hurdles that might otherwise inhibit casual listeners, all the while protecting ISGM's commercial rights.

The Designers Accord, a community of more than 100,000 designers who are committed to environmentally-friendly and socially-responsible design practices, has launched an online platform for sharing design ideas and has chosen to publish all of the site's submissions and materials under a Creative Commons Attribution license. The Designers Accord Web Community is a repository of case studies, resources, methodologies, and best practices that have been created by designers and are intended for public use.

Into Infinity, the CC-licensed art and music exhibition produced by dublab in collaboration with Creative Commons, is going strong, with regular additions by artists and musicians from all over the world. We've already seen some great remixes of the works, which we're looking forward to presenting publicly soon - we've got an installation lined up for CC's 6th Birthday Party in San Francisco on December 18. For now, we're pleased to announce the debut of the Into Infinity Audio Mega-Mixer, a soundboard that lets you create in-the-moment sound collages from all of Into Infinity's 8-second audio loops. Check it out on http://intoinfinity.com

SoundCloud, a new media sharing site that allows musicians to post their works easily, share them securely, interact with other musicians in a collaborative fashion, and check stats on song listens/comments, has integrated CC licensing into its framework by giving users the choice to upload their works under a CC license or a public domain declaration.

Aviary, whose mission is to "make the world's creation accessible," has baked Creative Commons licensing into their platform of live image editing applications. The site has launched with three distinct tools so far that help artists create and share fantastic images with the intention of eventually creating a new kind of market place to encourage commercial licensing of their CC licensed work through our new CC+ protocol, which is basically a Creative Commons license + some other agreement which provides "morePermissions."

MuseumPods has collaborated with CC to produce the "
Podcast Publishing, Access, and Rights Survey," which will gather insight from museum and education communities about their interest in Creative Commons and CC licenses, as well as attitudes towards sharing in general.

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  • [cc-info] ccNewsletter #10 - ccLearn, Melissa Reeder, 12/10/2008

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