ICTlogy

Here come my notes on the Open Education 2006: Community, Culture, and Content that we are attending:

Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Welcome and Keynote

Welcome and eduCommons 2.1.0 Launch
David Wiley, COSL/Utah State University

David presents the upcoming version of eduCommons, the OpenCourseWare management system designed specifically to support OpenCourseWare.

Some features:

• IMS content importation
• Choose license
• Add metadata
• Easy translation into other languages within the same material
• RSS output
• Post to del.icio.us

What is Commercial Use? The Line Between Commercial & Non Commercial
Mia Garlick, Creative Commons

Short intro abut Creative Commons

Rapid growth of adoption (linkback measuring) from 12/2005 on.
Trending to more flexible? decreasing noncommercial, decreasing no derivatives, decreasing share alike.
Successful court case decision in the Netherlands.
CC searchers: Yahoo, Google, Flickr, blip.tv
MS Office CC add-in

Next step: let people be aware that CC is not only good per se but for reuse benefits: if you create content and make it available, some other people might find it useful and be using it.

NonCommercial use

Can I charge for educational content?
What’s my understanding of “open” or “free”?
What is, actually, commercial/noncommercial?

There is an ongoin dicussion in the Creative Commons Wiki on this issue: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/DiscussionDraftNonCommercial_Guidelines and a “NonCommercial USE: Creative Commons’ Survey”.

Main aspects to keep in mind or to track when to decide whether a commercial use is likely to happen:

• Nature of the user
• Nature of the use: advertising
• Conditions on Use: For Services Providee
• Conditions on Use: Original Work
• Conditions on Use: Derivative Works

Is NonCommercial a suitable license choice in education?
Important in education to allow derivative works.
“many people can or will make the licensing choice only once. In a collavborative context, license changes can be difficult or even impossible” Erick Möller, The Casefor Free Use: Reasons Not to Use a Creative Commons NonCommercial License

Arguments against NonCommercial:

• incompatibility with other “free” projects (i.e. Wikipedia): actually, the problem with Wikipedia is project splitting due to FDL vs. BY-SA licenses. NC is not the barrier to compatibility
• prevents charging for course materials: just ask for permission
• hurts innovative new business models: mainly add supported initiatives. NC prevents the incentive to add value to your work. If work is freely available, people will only be incentivised to make money by adding considerable value. Ain’t got solution?

Main comments by the audience:

• “free” is not about money, but about creator and user freedoms [related to FLD vs. BY-SA incompatibilities
• funding issues are… quite tough issues! Funding might require copyright… public funding might require open, so…?

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