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Subject: development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

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  • From: David Wiley <dw2 AT opencontent.org>
  • To: development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons <cc-education AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-education] Quick draft
  • Date: Mon, 09 Feb 2004 16:02:10 -0700

email AT greglondon.com wrote:

On Mon, 9 Feb 2004 11:20:47 -0500, Zachary Chandler wrote:

Which then seems more attractive: a larger pool
comprised, in part, of more restricted content, or a smaller pool of open content?

Ack!!! no wonder the push for an education-only license
continues. You begin with the questionable assumption that more educators will contribute to an education-only license.

There is actually rather sound logic behind this idea. Most people want to give up few rights. Few people want to give up most rights. There is a fairly smooth continnum in between the two zealous ends. This is explained in more detail here - http://www.reusability.org/blogs/david/archives/000139.html

And you bifurcate the issue into only two simple options: open-license-gives-small-pool or edu-license-gives-big-pool

No, Zack didn't do this. I wrote in the draft. I believe empowering the users to choose between attachment to educational institution (which the CC lawyers tell me has a very clearly defined meaning, in the US legal system anyway) was the best compromise we could arrive at based on all the opinions expressed during the last several months' discussion.

A third alternative would be educating the teachers. Even IF the assumption
is correct that more teachers
would contribute to a education-only license, that could be changed with an enrollment campaign of getting
the word out to teachers that something like CC-BY-SA
would tap into a much bigger commons than CC-BY-TeachersOnly.

I'm not sure what your background is, but I'm not sure you're aware of the massive undertaking you're describing if you're talking about getting teachers to change the way they do anything. "Let's just educate teachers" has been the battle cry of everyone from politicians to educational researchers. Generally speaking we can't even get teachers to read journals or magazines about how to teach better, let alone actually teach better. This isn't because they're bad or necssarily hard-headed. They're just inordinately busy, pulling off superhuman feats to simply teach lessons and provide feedback to students. Systemic change in education is an entire field of study in and of itself, and my field (instructional technology) has a long history of trying to "just educate the teachers" to use the latest technology and failing spectacularly. I don't mean to be abrasive, but (speaking as a student and sometime producer of educational and school-related research) I don't believe the third alternative is realistic in the short term. We need stepping stones to get us to our real target.

Perhaps I should state again what my own personal target is: educational works licensed for use only on condition of attribution. Attribution is the academic way for good reason. This is where I would eventuaally love to see many educational materials. However, people won't get from where they are to here in one step. I believe the proposed license to be a leap many will be able to make.

Richard Stallman created teh first GNU-GPL license in 1984.
The first program to use the license was a text editor.
Linus Torvalds wrote the first linux kernel in 1991.
RedHat went IPO selling Linux installations in 1999.
SIXTEEN YEARS to get from zero to MILLIONS of Linux installations.

I promise you that you will NEVER see this level of growth,
adoption, and expansion, on a work that is licensed
education only.
You have a "play within a play" problem here, though. Geeks (in the positive sense, including myself) who like to play with hardware and install OSs no one has ever heard of really dig this stuff. Teachers and educators just don't. There are stacks and stacks of school change research and cases documenting the rapid rate at which teachers are not adopting technological innovations. And I should say that, because my interest is primarily in facilitating informal learning, the school arguments are only a small part of what we need to consider.

If you push an educational only license, you may
increase the number of initial contributions, but
you will be much harder pressed to move the project
beyond the initial, Richard Stallman phase of
little more than a working text editor and C compiler.

Because this is conjecture there's no arguing with it. Whether an educational use license can facilitate a long-term movement is an empirical question which only time can answer. And whether or not the current draft will be the same cc.edu five or even two years from now depends completely on the way users respond. The cc.edu license effort is not a 9 months one-off which generates a license that never updates or changes. The process of monitoring use and adapting to community wants and needs will be very dynamic. None of us are expecting to get this perfect the first time.

D




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