development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

[Heather Ford <hford AT csli.stanford.edu>]

Thanks for your response, David. I think that a collaboration would be 
really great here. 

At 08:14 AM 12/11/2003, you wrote:
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!

Thank you :)


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. =)

Sure thing - at what stage are we with this? It would be really great to 
have a summary of the sticking points if there are any? Who is in charge 
etc?


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.

Great! I will chat to larry about it in the next few weeks. 


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.

I couldn't agree with you more on this. I also think that, as more and 
more materials become available, there will be an even greater need for 
people to find ways of filtering this data into relevant resources - a set 
of distributed tools as you suggest would be much more sustainable as you 
say. 

 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?

Would love to - I think that it would be great to collaborate on this - 
will mention it at the Idlelo Open Source Conference in Cape Town in 
January. I'll be back in California on the 18th of January.

H.


D

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Heather Ford