development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

[David Wiley <dw2 AT opencontent.org>]

Heather Ford wrote:

> 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 ;)
>  
Glad to hear you're all in one piece!

> 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 absolutely think this has to be done. You're right on target. However, 
I think we need to nail down the cc.edu license first. It's hard to 
hoist the banner and call people to it when we don't know what to write 
on it. =)

> 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?
>  
I had contacted Larry a few months ago about an (standalone / not 
instructor-led) online course in the basics of CC. I think this refining 
down to a narrower topic you propose is a better idea.

> 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. 
>  
I hope there will be a role for our EduCommons / "sourceforge for 
educational materials" project here. From the proposal (for which the 
money has turned on!):

"In the second project, “EduCommons,” we will work to facilitate the 
sustainable creation of free and open educational materials which can be 
distributed and redistributed to support learning in a variety of formal 
and informal settings. While there are several projects underway to 
facilitate the creation of free and open educational materials (c.f. 
MIT/OCW, CMU/OLI), these projects involve the creation of a finite 
amount of educational materials given a finite amount of financial 
support. In other words, the funds spent on the MIT, CMU, and similar 
projects facilitate the creation of a finite amount of materials but no 
more. If it were possible to spend a finite amount of funding on a 
project which would facilitate the creation of free and open educational 
materials in perpetuity, such a project would be truly sustainable. We 
believe that if granting agencies such as the Hewlett Foundation are to 
achieve the educational impact they desire to achieve, they must move 
beyond the “pay a fixed amount, get a fixed amount” model of supporting 
educational materials creation."

Later today my blog will have the job descriptions for the two 
additional fulltime software engineers we're hiring to actually build 
this thing (total of three plus a UI designer). We're also taking 
advantage of our university connections, with a research team of PhD 
students driving research, requirements, and evaluation for the 
engineering team.

> 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)
>
> - note: is there a way that we can use the openoffice tool to produce, 
> edit and update these docs?
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>  
I'm going to pass this list on to the research team for use in creating 
the requirements. We're trying to close requirements by the end of 
January, and will be holding a meeting with interested parties here in 
Logan to do a focus group-style meeting over a near final draft 
requirements document. Would you be interested in attending sometime in 
mid to late January?

D