development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

[Steve Foerster <steve AT longlever.com>]

Hello everyone!

First of all, for what it's worth, I didn't infer anything personal in 
David Palmer's comments.

As far as what an educational license should say, I'm still in favor of 
BY-SA (i.e. commercial uses allowed).  However, what's suitable for one 
educational project may be completely unsuitable for another equally 
educational project.  Perhaps a suite of licenses that reflect this is 
the answer?  But then, we're back to CC itself, aren't we?


I'm still curious about the following things:

* When EduCommons might be online

* How EduCommons will work and whether people starting projects will be 
able to choose whatever license they wish for them

* Who will own the material that is collaboratively produced via EduCommons

* When and where will the OSLO meeting will be in January

(David Wiley, if you answered these and I somehow missed the email, can 
you resend to me off list?)


If there's some sort of plurality pleasing "Education License" with 
restrictions that my group and I find unpalatable, but EduCommons allows 
a variety of licenses among which is BY-SA, then that's good enough for 
us.

The plan for the Free Curricula Foundation (now on hold pending more 
information about EduCommons) includes freedom for a project's initiator 
to select the license right for them, including Design Science License, 
GNU Free Document License, the range of CC licenses, and public domain.


Incidentally, one reason we're perfectly happy to drop the Free 
Curricula Foundation plan should EduCommons prove an adequate substitute 
is that it's actually a means to an end for us, not the end itself.  Our 
actual goal is to set up a system of inexpensive, globally available 
standardized examinations that are based on free curricula and 
correspond with university level knowledge.

Called "New World University", the target market is the developing 
world, and the idea is to offer a university equivalent to those who 
otherwise would likely have to go altogether without.  It's not Oxford, 
but then, that's not the objective.  (You can imagine that I well 
understood the comment on the importance of allowing individualized 
study in any definition of "educational"!)

I suppose this is rather off topic, so should anyone here be interested 
in the project, please contact me off list rather than here.

-=Steve=-


--
Stephen H. Foerster
Senior Project Manager
LongLever Consulting

steve AT longlever.com