development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

[David Wiley <dw2 AT opencontent.org>]

email AT greglondon.com wrote:

> And those contributions won't be going into a 
> public commons, they'll be going into a much SMALLER,
> "education only" pasture, where people can only
> use works for educational purposes and only students
> and teachers will likely make any contributions 
> to the works.

Yes, it is clear to everyone that works licensed this way go not into 
the public domain, and not into the smaller "creative commons" but into 
a smaller "educational commons." And these works will only be available 
for educational use, but I would challenge your assumption that only 
teachers and students (by these terms I assume you mean those attached 
to traditional schools) will contribute. Of course, this is only my 
personal conjecture. ;)

> Do you not see the cost of doing this will 
> likely mean most works will be vanity works?
> Works contributed by a professor, used in 
> his/her class only, with typos / improvements
> only to be contributed by his/her students?

(You seem to be assuming that everyone will invoke the formal education 
option. If you're not assuming this please let us know, but this is the 
only way I can make sense of your argument.)

I don't see this. Having run the OpenContent project for five years, I 
remember seeing lots of educational material created by people who 
weren't teachers or students at schools. When the "open education 
license" is used, anyone who wants to learn is counted an educational 
user. More on this below.

> You are cutting off the majority of teh population
> that would benefit from these works and therefore
> you are cutting off that population from making
> any CONTRIBUTIONS to those works that would BENEFIT
> those works.

Unless you either (1) assume the formal education connection, or (2) 
assume that the majority of the population wants to make commercial or 
non-learning related uses of the materials, I disagree.

> A simple CC-BY-SA license allows EVERYONE access
> to the work. And everyone benefits from using the
> work, meaning ANYONE could be a likely contributor
> TO the work to improve it. An education only license
> takes "everyone" and reduces to a tiny fraction of it.

Only if you assume as above.

> If the only real excuse for the education only 
> license is its easier to convince teachers to
> contribute works under such a license, then 
> the time and energy spent coming up with an 
> education-only license would be better spent,
> in the long run, on EDUCATING THE TEACHERS 
> so they understand that the benefit of a public
> commons only comes when the entire public can
> use and contribute to the works, not just a small
> minority.

To get their attention we need a banner we can hoist and wave. 
"CC-By-SA" is not the banner that my elementary school teachers at Davis 
Creek Elementary will flock to. I doubt that many university types would 
com to it. It needs to be specific to education.

> My perl training manual is CC-BY-SA. Anyone can 
> use it. If everyone can use it, the potential
> for fixes and contributions to improve it are
> far better than if I limit it to CC-BY-TeachersOnly
> or something similar. If a company decides to 
> offer print-on-demand books of my manual, don't
> you think they'd want it to be the best possible
> manual? And any changes they make to it would still
> be licensed under CC-BY-SA, still in the public
> commons. Non-educational uses will not take a 
> sharealike work out of the commons. Commercial
> uses will not take a sharealike work out of the
> commons. 

The CC-By-TeachersStudentsOthersAffiliatedWithaSchoolOnly is an option, 
and not even the default option at that. It seems that there is a large 
assumption that everyone is going to choose it. I don't think they will.

D