development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

[Christoph Wild <Christoph.Wild AT uibk.ac.at>]

Hi all,

I am working with a competence centre located here at the University of
Innsbruck (www.uibk.ac.at) that has E-Learning as one of its main areas or
responsibility. We are actively working with scientists to prepare course
materials and help them to get a better understanding on what E-Learning can
be. Therefore we are also very interested in the area of copyright, open
content, and E-Learning which is how I actually got here. Now here are my
two cents:

> I'm particularly interested in the internationalization of any CC license.
> The entire CC effort is based on US copyright laws, and even the site states
> that "it is at least conceivable that some aspect of our licenses does not
> jibe with a particular country's laws." It's hard to get into passionate
> discussions if a person is unsure of whether it will have any impact in
> his/her own country...:).

We are too. In Austria there is little to none effort going on to sort out
how copyright issues affect the E-Learning business. While other European
countries try to find a way to make copyrighted materials accessible for
educational purposes we are hardly making any progress - one could even say
that most instructors are not aware of the potential dangers involved in
using copyrighted materials. The question of who owns the materials created
during the time the instructor works at the university is one that is not
addressed and thus not solved.
We are planning to have a meeting of specialists working in higher education
from all over Austria in October. One of the sessions will focus on open
content and I would be glad if we somehow could contribute to the progress
of getting an internationalised cc-education.

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

Imho course materials are different in one important point from software
code: If someone introduces bad code into software the application will not
work correctly or even fail to work at all. If someone modifies a text and
alters it in a way, that - in the worst case - negates the original meaning,
it might still be perfect language-wise and make sense to a novice in this
field of knowledge. Attribution might - in such a setting - even be worse
for the original author than if someone simply 'stole' his work.
Especially in the more sensitive areas of history such a scenario is not
absolutely fantastic.

No few instructors might be interested in open content if they are offered
mechanisms to retain a certain degree of control over the development of
their materials. Are you thinking about a type of license / model that makes
somehting open for contribution but handles modifications like the
'cvs-committers' in open source coding?

Regards,

Chris

-- 
Christoph Wild
New Media Competence Group

University of Innsbruck
Innrain 52
6020 Innsbruck 
Austria
fon: +43 512 507 9073
fax: +43 512 507 2777