development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

[Stephen Downes <Stephen.Downes AT nrc-cnrc.gc.ca>]

I don't want to 'shoot anything down' but I do have some comments...

Steve Foerster wrote:

One can browse the entire Internet as one would a hard drive using
services like DMOZ and Yahoo!  If open content is categorized
intelligently, I'd think it would be possible to make it all reasonably
accessible by drill down.

I beg to differ. I haven't used dmoz or Yahoo to locate anything 
on the web since the late 90s. The size of the internet long ago
made such directories impracical. Moreover, the a priori 
classification schemes turn out to be difficult to implement and
even more difficult to use, after a certain level of complexity
is reached.

Perhaps a useful approach would be to designate a set of meta tags that
tag its document as open content and specifies which license applies to
it?  If there also were a recognized categorization scheme that had its
own meta tag, then robots could add open content to a directory. Of course, this approach is HTML centric, but there could be allowances
for PDFs, RTFs, Word documents, and other file formats that were
available from a page with such tags.

It is HTML specific, or at the very least, text specific, which means
that it won't work at all for non-text formats such as images, videos,
animations, simulations, and the like. Given that separate metadata
files must be created for these formats, and given that it is better
to use a single data representation to facilitate search, it makes
sense to use metadata files for everyinging, a la RSS. Moreover,
the use metadata typically means we do not need to load entire
files to see what they are, so there may be some bandwidth savings.

There are some other issues related to embedding tags in the
documents themselves, which I'll raise should it become necessary.

<< The second part is a mechanism to preview items before inserting them

into your document. I don't know what to say about this, really. >>

Since I'm going meta tag crazy, I'll ask whether the description meta
tag is useful here as a sort of thumbnail for text?  I guess it depends
whether you're looking for a specific paragraph or a whole document.

Think metadata, not meta tag. In such a case, the description metadata
plays this role. But my experience is that, when considering 
whether to *use* something, they like to see the actual resource,
not just a 'thumbnail' description.

<< The third part is the payoff. Once the user has reviewed the

resource, she selects either all or part of it. The resource is then
copied directly into the docuemnt in the appropriate format. For
example, suppose the user found a text on owls, and located a paragraph
worth quoting. She highlights the paragraph and then double-clicks
(say). The paragraph is then copied into the document, and a tag or
caption is placed into the document identifying the bibliographical
information and the creative commons (or equivalent) license information
(this latter is key for commercial users, who will not reuse content
unless they are certain, and can prove, that they have permission to use
the content). >>

I suppose the open content directory that uses a meta tag system could
also generate code for use by those publishing modified documents.

"If you use this content in your document, you must add the following
HTML code to your document's header:

<meta etc />
<meta blah />"

Right idea, but again I would do it slightly differently.

CC licensing information can be very easily added to metadata describing
a resource. RSS 1.0 has a CC module. I am developing / implementing
a very similar system to use ODRL in learning resource metadata. 

If metadata is being (automatically) *created*, then scanning the
document
may help retrieve such CC information. This can already be done thanks
to
the existing CC labels sites use. 

Secondly, I would not say 'you must add the following' code to your 
document - I would simply include the information as a part of the
cut-paste process. Making it an automatic part of the software makes
it a lot easier to use.

-- Stephen