ccNewsletter #8 - Culture Commons

Melissa Reeder, August 19th, 2008

For all of you interested in what CC is currently doing in the culture space — check out this month’s edition of the ccNewsletter. 

The ccNewsletter comes out every two months and is a great way to get up to speed on current CC news, whether you’re already familiar with CC or new to the scene. I encourage you to check it out and to sign up. 

As always, a big shout-out to CC Philippines for designing the PDF version.

NSF Task Force on Cyberlearning

Jane Park, August 19th, 2008

The National Science Foundation Task Force issued a report late in June on cyberlearning, more specifically on “Fostering Learning in the Networked World: The Cyberlearning Opportunity and Challenge.” It is, in their words, “A 21st Century Agenda for the National Science Foundation” concerning ICT for learning. The report outlines five recommendations for “growth and opportunities for action,” one of which concerns the promotion of open educational resources (OER). According to recommendation #4:

“Materials funded by NSF should be made readily available on the web with permission for unrestricted reuse and recombination. New grant proposals should make their plans clear for both the availability and the sustainability of materials produced by their funded project.”

In the future, ccLearn hopes to see these goals develop into concrete initiatives. The National Science Foundation has an annual federal budget of $6.06 billion and currently funds 20% of all federally supported research by higher education institutions in the United States.

Creative Commons HowTo

Greg Grossmeier, August 16th, 2008

Molly Kleinman, Copyright Specialist and Special Projects Librarian at the University of Michigan, just wrote up a nice howto for people who use Creative Commons licensed material in their work. This will hopefully add to the repository of knowledge for best practices on material integration.

This is an ongoing issue in the community. No matter how straight forward the instructions for providing attribution to a work are, mistakes will always be made. Most times the mistakes are made not in malice but in a lack of guidance. Luckily, Molly is taking up the task on her blog.

Her examples are easy to understand along with providing various methods of accomplishing the same goal. She even has an “Ideal” example and a “Realistic” example.

From Molly:

I’m taking the material I use in my workshops, mixing it up with CC’s extensive documentation, and posting the results here. If anyone has ideas for topics they’d like me to cover, let me know.

Here’s hoping she continues on this project of producing easy to understand examples of how to use Creative Commons licenses effectively and correctly.

Version 3.0 Austria now goes live!

Patricia Escalera, August 15th, 2008

We are very pleased to announce that Creative Commons Austria has successfully completed the versioning of the ported Creative Commons licensing suite in Austria. Following the versioning of Creative Commons Germany in late July 2008, Version 3.0 of the six standard Creative Commons licenses is now legally and linguistically adapted to Austrian law. A special Thank You to the Legal Project Lead for CC Austria, Dr. Florian Philapitsch, LL.M., who has led the process!

For a more detailed explanation, please see the summary of all significant changes (in German).

Congratulations, CC Austria!

Mozilla Concept Series

Cameron Parkins, August 14th, 2008

The Mozilla Concept Series is a recently announced initiative from Mozilla to garner greater participation in creating their newest browser, Aurora. While there are some intriguing inaugural designs, the most engaging part of the project is that Mozilla is pooling the greater web community for submissions in the form of ideas, mockups (textual/visual examples), and prototypes (interactive illustrations). Of note to the CC community is that Mozilla is requiring that all ideas and mockups are submitted under a CC license, making them easily “redistributable and remixable” (prototypes require an accompanying Mozilla Public License). From Mozilla:

We only ask that all concepts and related source materials be freely redistributable and remixable under either a Creative Commons license (for Ideas and Mockups) or the Mozilla Public License (for Prototypes) so that we can all effectively collaborate on the exploration. Again, the intent is not for these concepts to evolve directly into new products but rather to provoke thought, facilitate discussion and provide inspiration.