development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

["David Wiley" <dw2 AT opencontent.org>]

Laura,

Thanks for you work on this. A few thoughts from this end.

I don't think its a good idea to send people to the choose your license
option page with the options filled in. They've already elected which
options they want, why make them click twice? Let's just send them to the
metadata page.

Stephen seemed to interpret you last message as saying you would require
people to enter metadata for their works.I did not read it that way; on
the current "choose" page it says all fields are optional. I think it's
fine to give them the option of including more information. I also
understood you to say that if someone choose the education license part of
the metadata would be completed automatically (perhaps adding a keyword
like "education license" or the like). I think that is absolutely fine as
well, though we might want to talk more about exactly what the
automatically generated keyword(s) would be.

So I see it working like this (trying to simplify compared to Laura's
description):

Go to Educator's Page
Click "Use the Education License"
Go to a page showing optional metadata which the user can choose to complete
Add Education License logo to your work

Some comments for Stephen:


Downes, Stephen said:
> "In the area where you click to include more information about your
> work a few keywords would be entered automatically to improve user
> search-ability of educationally licensed work."
>
> If you require more information before issuing the license, then
> you have just defeated the objective of making it easier to get
> the license.

I don't get this at all. She says "keywords would be entered
automatically." That's not requiring additional information. The Choose
your license page always has the optional metadata fields on it, so I
don't see how automating
the creation of some of the metadata or providing the user the option of
entering more makes things difficult. If anything, automating some of the
metadata creation makes the education license easier to use than any other
cc license.

> Moreover, you have created a cost to obtaining the license: the
> donation of information to the CC search system. Some people
> who want a CC-Edu license may not want to be included in the
> search.

No. It is always completely optional (see
http://creativecommons.org/license/)

> The process should be differently ordered. Once *having* obtained
> the license text, users should then be given the opportunity
> to donate information (and, of course, the choice to not do it).

I believe this is what Laura described.

> I will leave discussion of the idea of putting it in the education
> corner to others, save only to add the observations that, first, this
> also defeats the objective of making it simple, and second, it makes

If you were an educator who knew nothing about cc, and you went to the
homepage and saw "Choose your license" and "Educators' and Scholars'
Corner" as choices, where would you go? Plus, I think links back to CC
from the Education License should all be written so as to take clickers
straight to the educators' and scholars' corner. I don't see how providing
someone with information specific to their context first (as opposed to
giving them decontextualized information first) makes things less simple.
Helping them understand the benefits of cc in their own domain right off
the bat is the best way to make it simple for them. If they want "the
bigger picture", they  click back to the homepage.

> it much easier (and therefore more likely) that special and additional
> conditions will be proposed (the first of which we just saw).

I will agree that automating the creation of metadata in order to make it
easier on the user is a special condition we can provide for the
specifically educational audience. However, I see nothing negative about
it whatsoever.

I'm including Laura's message below in case anyone wants to reread based
on the competing interpretations above.

D

>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Laura Lynch [mailto:llynch AT stanford.edu]
>> Sent: October 9, 2003 9:59 PM
>> To: development of an education license or license option for
>> Creative Commons
>> Subject: RE: [cc-education] A radical alternative proposal
>>
>>
>> Hello-
>>
>> Well today's team meeting produced some interesting discussion about
>> the education license and how it might work best for users.  David
>> Wiley's idea of linking to the education license from the educators
>> and scholars corner would be the best and most user friendly way of
>> making the license available to licensors.  The licensing process
>> would work something like this:
>>
>> Go to Educators and Scholars Corner.
>> Choose Education License.
>> You'll be lead to the Choose Your License page w/options filled in.
>> In the area where you click to include more information about your
>> work a few keywords would be entered automatically to improve user
>> search-ability of educationally licensed work.
>> Add Creative Commons Education logo to your work.
>>
>> There is some resistance to making education an option on the
>> original 'choose your license' page because our goal is to keep the
>> license building page as simple as possible.  While education is only
>> one additional option it will inevitably lead to other groups (i.e.
>> webcaster's) wanting to add their brand as an option as well.  I like
>> the idea of the license being linked from the educators and scholars
>> corner because it provides a space for future projects in support of
>> freely available educational material.
>>
>> Any thoughts or feedback would be greatly appreciated.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Laura