development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

["Sandy B" <mizb AT hilo.net>]

Please take me off this list;there are 20 mails from your group.I don't even
know you people.
mizb AT hilo.net
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Stephen Downes" <stephen AT downes.ca>
To: "development of an education license or license option for Creative
Commons" <cc-education AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Monday, April 04, 2005 5:53 PM
Subject: Re: [cc-education] A new hope for cc.edu


> Hiya,
>
> When the CC-Edu proposal was first raised in 2003, the possibility of a
> special 'education' license was discussed at length. As in the case of
> the current round of discussions, such a license was always envisioned
> as applying to educational institutions.
>
> This proposal met with substantial opposition because it would offer for
> free materials to institutions that would charge tuition, but not offer
> for free the same materials for people who were learning on their own.
> It was essentially, therefore, a means of subsidizing institutional
> learning at the expense of personal learning.
>
> Two years later this has not changed.
>
> The By-NC-SA rebranding was a compromise position. It was approached
> because most of what we were trying to capture with an educational
> license was captured by these terms. It allowed persona learning, and it
> allowed educational institutions to use the materials without charge.
>
> It was true then, and is true today, that most educational institutions
> are considered non-commercial. This definition is arrived at not by
> looking at the nature of each transaction, which would be absurd, but by
> looking at the narture of the institution. There is a commonly known and
> widely used distinction between enterprises that are non-commercial and
> those that are commercial, between organizations that exist to provide a
> public service and those that exist in order to generate revenue.
>
> It is true that overtly commercial enterprises are not considered
> 'educational' under the proposed rebranding of By-NC-SA. That such
> enterprises are considered 'educational' at all is more marketing than
> matter of fact. They are first and foremost profit-making enterprises,
> and therefore ought to pay their own way. The term 'educational', when
> applied to institutions, ought to apply only to those institutions
> founded for the specific and only purpose of providing an education, and
> not those that use education as a means of making money.
>
> We understand the distinction between the University of North Carolina
> and the DMX Zone CBT provider, between the University of California and
> the University of Phoenix, and it is sophistry to pretend that we do
> not. And this distinction is drawn precisely by the 'non-commercial'
> attribute, and none other.
>
> What we have here is what I warned of in 2003 - the commercialization of
> the proposed CC-Education license. That is what the blurring of
> commercial and non-commercial enterprises under the guise of 'education'
> accomplishes. This to me shows all the more the urgency of ensuring that
> no Creative Commons license exist that allow institutions license to do
> what individuals cannot, indeed, of ensuring that 'educational' content
> means, explicitly, non-commercial content.
>
>
> -- Stephen
>
>
>
> -- 
> __________________________________________________________________
>
> Stephen Downes ~ Senior Researcher ~ E-Learning Research Group
> National Research Council Canada ~ Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada
> http://www.downes.ca  ~  stephen AT downes.ca
> __________________________________________________________________
>
>
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>
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