development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

[David Palmer <davidpalmer AT westnet.com.au>]

On Wed, 2003-12-10 at 10:03, Heather Ford wrote:
> Hi all,

Hello Heather.
> 
> Back in Johannesburg after an epic journey involving 3 days stuck at JFK 
> Airport due to snow storms. I have been awake since 2.30am - ah, the joys 
> of travelling ;)
> 
> I wanted to aggregate our discussions over the past 2 weeks and apply them 
> to a specific theme: Creative Commons 101. This would be an online tool 
> that enables educators to share resources and ideas about how to teach 
> students about the concepts and philosophy of open content. Pretty much an 
> extension of the discussions that we've been having about how to make it 
> easier to actually make practical use of CC content - but starting on a 
> small scale with a particular topic, rather than dealing with how to find 
> open content throughout the web.

I don't know what sort of programme you are running, but you might find
this useful:-

http://sourceforge.net/projects/cce-interact/

> 
> I know that Lessig and Glenn Otis Brown have been teaching a Creative 
> Commons course at Stanford this year - so it would be useful if one of 
> them could provide input here - especially with regard to the mode of 
> teaching i.e. were case studies used? where were these sourced from? what 
> lessons were learned? did student assignments produce any new knowledge?

For something like this you're probably better off approaching Lawrence
directly here:-

http://www.lessig.org/blog/

Through the email link at the top of the page. You'll have to go through
a spam filter, and you might have to be patient because he operates
under a bit of a backlog.

> 
> I was thinking about CC South Africa and wondering how we could form a 
> partnership with universities around the country that would make maximum 
> use of students as volunteers. One of the major advantages of housing CC 
> at a university is that one can leverage student support by teaching a 
> course and perhaps using assignments as a way of generating new ideas and 
> actions for CC in a particular country. There is also the opportunity to 
> share case studies and ideas etc across geographical boundaries to give CC 
> the global context that it requires in order to be truly successful. 
> 
> So what I propose is a website and accompanying mailing lists that have 
> the following facilities: 
> 
> 1. Users/curriculum developers sign up as authors and develop personal 
> profiles detailing: country, institution, reasons for joining, personal 
> interest, experience (subject/discipline), links to personal websites 
> etc., rating according to number of times the author has a) downloaded b) 
> uploaded material etc (lurker, weed, guru etc)
> 
> - note: each entry would be linked to other individuals with the same 
> entries eg if the author enters South Africa as her country of residence, 
> then they could find all other authors from South Africa (Friendster model)
> 
> 2. Authors contribute case studies consisting of: legal reports, news 
> stories/blog entries, images, cartoons, audio, video, multimedia licensed 
> under open content (authors must upload these resources giving full 
> license/author details as well as short descriptions/summaries of 
> materials to enable extensive metadata with which to search) - case 
> studies can be edited and updated by others when they re-use (wikis?) ALSO 
> fact sheets with information about a particular country's Internet 
> penetration (perhaps classified as 'high', medium, low so that authors can 
> join collaborative groups according to access levels)

If you approach the computor science depts in some of these institutions
you will probably find a number of individuals keen to set up open
source software programmes that are economical to implement (software is
free, download the iso and burn it to disc), and you could perhaps
approach one of the bigger hardware companies to help with good quality
secondhand, reconditioned hardware in return for product exposure in a
potential new market.
I'm in the process of doing just that with a programme I have going 
introducing Debian into the school curriculum here in Western Australia.
> 
>  - note: is there a way that we can use the openoffice tool to produce, 
> edit and update these docs?

Yes. The new Open Office edition will be out very shortly. In
coordination with all the image manipulation packages in Debian, you
would have all you need. Debian is extremely stable, simply doesn't
crash.
> 
> 3. Teaching tips - authors share stories of: 'what works and doesn't work' 
> in different learning environments (blog format?)
> 
> 4. Assignments - authors share examples of assignments that maximise the 
> student providing useful, practical insight/action for the open content 
> movement (perhaps choosing from a consistently updated 'to do' list)
> 
> - note: there is also the opportunity to get students to partner with one 
> another for a truly multidisciplinary approach to student assignments - 
> students could partner up (within a class or even in other 
> countries/regions) to produce material e.g. a graphic design student could 
> partner with a law student to produce an animated video describing how the 
> licenses work to an audience of musicians - you could even make this a 
> random assignment where you choose: theme, audience and product to get the 
> name of your assignment
> 
> 5. Search by: keyword, country, internet penetration group, resource 
> (image, multimedia, fact sheet, case study etc), discipline (law, social 
> science, music, journalism etc)
> 
> 4. Mailing list to alert authors to new resources, changes to their 
> documents etc
> 
> 5. Mailing list to discuss progress of the project and ideas for 
> collaboration (eg volunteer sharing)
> 
> 6. Opportunity for authors to host mailing lists according to new subjects 
> eg Teaching Creative Commons in an Anthropology class, or Teaching 
> Creative Commons to music students etc
> 
> 7. Links to cc education mailing list
> 
> (Mailing lists would link to author IDs so that users could go directly to 
> the website to find out more about authors of posts and put their ideas in 
> a particular context - better than having to do your own ineffective 
> investigations about authors when you join a list)
> 
> The project would aim to build a *community* around the cc education 
> license and to stimulate active engagement in the development of open 
> content ideas on a global scale. 
> 
> Once a model has been developed, it could be applied to other subjects or 
> multi-disciplinary learning areas.

There are php forum packages and chat programmes that would have
relevance in this context, also.
>  
> So, what do you all think? This probably can't all be done at once but it 
> would be useful to hear which - if any - are the better ideas.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Heather.
> 
Regards,

David.