development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

[David Wiley <dw2 AT opencontent.org>]

> A new license isn't needed for educational works.

Right. It's needed for educators.

> What's needed is a better explanation so teachers
> understand their works will benefit more under
> a public license rather than a education only license,
> that with the whole world reading their works,
> all bugs are shallow, and every person becomes a
> possible contributor to make their works better.

I agree completely. But I believe (conjecture alert!) that explaining 
isn't enough - this needs to be learning by doing. We need to encourage 
the baby steps of outsiders into the group. We need to let people have 
training wheels for a while. We need to provide little leagues, high 
school teams, junior college teams, university teams, AND professional 
sports teams. I agree that in a perfect world everyone would eventually 
reach the pinnacle of achievement in all their fields of endeavor. I 
hope that content producers eventually see the benefits of licensing 
many of their works under the least restrictive license possible. 
However, I believe that asking them to go from where they are now to 
where we hope they will end up *in one step* is completely unrealistic. 
They need little league. Some of them will never want to make the effort 
to advance beyond it, and (I think) we should encourage them to 
participate at whatever level they feel comfortable.

You will see this same scaffolding pattern in current Creative Commons 
licenses:

 -- Public domain dedication
 -- By, By-SA, By-NC-SA family of licenses
 -- Founder's Copyright

(See http://creativecommons.org/license/)

Each is progressively more restrictive, allowing folks who are initially 
willing to make little or less commitment to still participate 
meaningfully in the open content community - sort of an open content 
"legitimate peripheral participation". This has always been CC's 
approach, and the approach with the education license fits completely 
within this framework.

D