development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

["Alexander, Bryan" <balexan AT middlebury.edu>]

Title: RE: [cc-education] educational use clause

I see the reasoning.  And you might add that it's in the spirit of the US TEACH Act, which specifically weds fair use to institutions.

But I wonder about precisely the sort of nomadic, interstitial, institutionally creative pedagogical instances cybercultural practice affords.

  For one example, with admitted personal interest, is the Arab Culture and Civilization site we've created (http://www.nitle.org/arabworld/).  It's not tied to any school, but to an umbrella group representing 81 colleges and universities, NITLE.  Furthermore, most of the content was produced outside our group.  The resource is sound, in terms of content and pedagogical design, we feel.  Would this license be capable of application?

  For another example, this month's widely-read Wired piece on OpenCourseWare (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/mit_pr.html) draws our attention to non-institutionally-bound learning communities.  Their initial materials are traditional, being MIT curricula.  But what about materials they generate themselves?  The learning-driven groups are quite diverse:

One of the most popular offerings turned out to be Laboratory in Software Engineering, aka 6.170, a tough requirement for electrical engineering and computer science majors. Lam Vi Quoc, a fourth-year student at Vietnam's Natural Sciences University, relied on 6.170 lectures to supplement a software lab he was taking, and Evan Hoff, a software developer in Nashville, followed the course to improve his coding skills. In Karachi, Pakistan, a group of 100 students and professionals met weekly to study 6.170. In Kansas City, five members of the Greater Kansas City Java Professionals Association gathered monthly to take the course. In Mauritius, a tiny island nation in the Indian Ocean, Priya Durshini Thaunoo used 6.170 to prepare for a master's degree program at the University of Mauritius. Saman Zarandioon, an Iranian refugee living in Vienna, studied it to continue an education that was stalled by the Iranian government. And software developer Rahul Thadani in Birmingham, Alabama, took it to sharpen his skills.

And they are likely to swarm into communities of practice for learning:

Ultimately, MIT officials know, OpenCourseWare's success depends on the emergence of online communities to support individual courses. Margulies says MIT is eager to find third parties to create tools that would enable learners or educators to easily organize and manage discussion groups using OpenCourseWare content. "We'd like to see self-managed OpenCourseWare communities," says Margulies. "Our vision is to have this open source software on the site, as well as information that helps people build a learning community, whether it's in Namibia, Thailand, wherever."

(I blogged this at http://www.nitle.org/tech_news.php?id=289)

Would these instances have to consider themselves institutions in some way, in order to qualify?

Bryan Alexander
Center for Educational Technology
http://cet.middlebury.edu/bryan
ICQ: 23090001
AIM: "DoctorNemoBryan"
Windows Messenger: balexan AT middlebury.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: David Wiley [mailto:david AT wiley.ed.usu.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, August 27, 2003 9:52 AM
To: development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons
Subject: Re: [cc-education] educational use clause

Zachary Chandler wrote:

>ZC: Others with whom I have discussed this issue have voiced a concern
>over
>marrying cc.edu to the institution. Is there a way to word the language so that
>it is more inclusive, without watering down its clarity and usefulness?
> 
>
This was something I very much wanted to do initially. However, as the
legal people from Stanford Law looked at the literature / legal history
of the word "educational," they "encouraged" me to stick with the
traditional legal understanding of the term, which always involves an
institution. We've tried hard to make the license as open as possible
while still attached to the institution. If you haven't read my most
recent blog post, there's a little more detail on this there. 
http://www.reusability.org/blogs/david/archives/000252.html

D

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