development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

["Sanford Forte" <siforte AT ix.netcom.com>]

1) I like the idea of an educational license (as far as I can follow the details of the arguments for/against).

 

2) I like the idea of a colored schema for the licenses - brilliant! (no pun intended) It lets the user employ a part of his/her brain that isn't normally triggered by the minutiae of words. Let's embed as many degrees of cognitive freedom as possible to help users (as intuitively as possible) understand what they're doing without having to consult a manual. I wish we could design a little audio "help" section for anyone who clicks on a logo.

 

3) As for colors, I have no personal preference, other than that it should be 'noticed'. Burgundy/Blue do connote "intellectual weight" in Western culture, but orange clearly connotes "take heed", or "pay attention". (orange is highly revered in some cultures, btw) Conversations on the 'best' color for an IP will continue from this point on without me, other than to say it might be possible to have multi-colored logos, and that cultural connotation should be considered. [e.g. "...Red and gold are good luck colors in China, so you can be safe in using or wearing those colors when dealing with the Chinese. However, in Japan, red is associated with severing relationships and the Japanese use red ink for death notices! Black is avoided in most Asian counties because of its association with death, similar to the U.S. But in Japan, white is avoided for the same reason] http://library.kcc.hawaii.edu/external/asdp/econ/asian/barrett1.html

 

4) Whatever end result comes out of this discussion *must* end up as 'intuitively understood' by *users* as possible. That goes for language. If any of this is confusing to the user, it will not be used, or will be misused. I'm stating the obvious (and the participants seem sensitive to it), but this can't be said enough. My hat is off to all who have gotten "open source" and "free" content this far; however, we have to keep end users in mind. If the end result is not designed for the *lowest commin denominator* user, in terms of 'ease-of-understanding', then we are compromising the promise of open and free content. What's troubling to me is that even some of us (me, for sure) who participate in these forums often seem overwhelmed by the complexity of these issues. In terms of play out to end-users, that worries me.

 

Another concern about "free" and "open" content in educational settings is that those contributing to these efforts are assured of  maximum interoperability among venues (for instance Wikipedia, Creative Commons, Connexions, etc.) Everything should be fully interchangeable and easily understood, *without* confusing language, if at all possible.

 

Essentially, the following language (from David Wiley) - and intentions - strike me as 'clear' and 'functional'

- Require educational use as per the education use clause drafted and
discussed on this list,

- Require attribution as per the present option in the standard CC
infrastructure (because academics expect citations and references),

- Disallow commercial use as per the present option in the standard CC
infrastructure (because this is what educational licenses intuitively
mean to most people), and

- Allow modifications of your work as long as others share alike as per
the present option in the standard CC infrastructure (because this is
the spirit of teaching and learning -- passing on  what you know to
others who build upon and improve it).

 

Best,

Sanford Forte, Director
California Open Source Textbook Project
Palo Alto, CA
www.opensourcetext.org