IBM’s “Mastering the Creative Commons”

Cameron Parkins, October 13th, 2008

IBM, outside of their endeavors in personal computing and technology, is an active participant in the world of open source technology. It should come as no surprise then that IBM has an article on their website titled Mastering the Creative Commons. Filed in their “Web Development | Open Source” series, Uche Ogbuji does a nice job summing up what CC does:

Creative Commons (CC) is an organization of lawyers, technical experts, and managers, with a very broad community, whose goal is to “use private rights to create public goods”, by allowing creators to express degrees of licensing between the knee-jerk “all rights reserved” and public domain (in other words, “no rights reserved”). Creative Commons provides the legal framework and text of licenses that allow you to say that “some rights are reserved”, and allows this to be clearly discovered by others, so that they can determine whether their use is compatible with your reservations. The lawyers are involved when these reusable licenses are crafted and updated, with support and feedback from the community, with the idea that afterwards, the sharing can proceed on the Web with much less legal interference. In this article, learn how to express CC licenses for your work, how to use public services for finding work from others you can use, and how to identify such work yourself.

The article explains what our licenses do, how to license a work under CC, how to indicate that a work is CC-licensed (including a discussion of RDFa), and how to find CC-licensed works. While the article is available online and as a free PDF download, it is unfortunately not under a CC license. Regardless, it is great to see an organization like IBM support CC accurately and whole heartedly like this.

Netwaves Bytes: Electro 1

Cameron Parkins, October 10th, 2008

Netwaves Records, a netlabel that focuses on genre-oriented compilations, just released their first album, Electro 1. Focusing on music that ranges from “electro-pop” to “electro-clash”, Electro 1 has been released under a CC BY-NC-SA license. this means it can be freely shared and remixed as long as proper attribution is given, the resulting and original works are not sold, and any derivative works are shared under the same license. Download it here for weekend listening.

flickrleech

Cameron Parkins, October 10th, 2008

flickrleech is a great tool for those looking to search a large number of flickr photos at once - by utilizing Flickr’s API, flickrleech is able to display 200 images per page rather than the standard 10. As pointed out by Alvin Trusty, it simply “makes scanning for a picture much quicker.” 

While flickrleech has been around for a while, a new update has added the ability to search for photos by CC license. For those who scour Flickr searching for the perfect CC-licensed image, this functionality should mean less time spent searching and an immediately wider selection to choose from. Check it out for yourself here.

Two MIT OCW Courses Reach Million Visit Milestone

Jane Park, October 10th, 2008

A long-standing provider of open courseware, MITOpenCourseWare reached a million visit milestone yesterday for two of their online courses: 8.01 Physics I: Classical Mechanics and 18.06 Linear Algebra. The courses are two of MIT’s most popular to date, taught by renowned professors Walter Lewin and Gilbert Strang. From MIT’s media coverage on Lewin:

“Professor Lewin is an international webstar. He is well-known at MIT and beyond for his dynamic, inspiring and engaging lecture style. His courses are also among the most downloaded at iTunes U. 8.01 Physics I: Classical Mechanics explains the basic concepts of Newtonian mechanics, fluid mechanics, and kinetic gas theory, and a variety of interesting topics such as binary stars, neutron stars, and black holes.”

On Strang:

“Strang is a 50-year mathematics veteran whose teaching style is recognized internationally. Linear Algebra introduces mathematical concepts that include matrix theory, systems of equations, vector spaces, and positive definite matrices. “Everyone has the capacity to learn mathematics,” says Strang. “If you can offer a little guidance, and some examples, viewers discover that a whole world is open.”

8.01 Physics I: Classical Mechanics offers lecture notes, exams with solutions, complete videotaped lectures and their accompanying transcripts under CC BY-NC-SA. 18.06 Linear Algebra offers (interactive) Java applets with sound in addition to video lectures and translations into Chinese, Portuguese, and Spanish, also under CC BY-NC-SA. CC BY-NC-SA allows for these kinds of adaptations and derivations of material—and translation is a crucial step in broadening access to a global audience. 

There are other and more interesting ways to adapt material, however, and we are curious to know how the visitors constituting the 1,000,000+ hits of these two courses (and others) have actually used the materials. Since educational needs vary contextually, it would be beneficial to know what types of adaptations are being made beyond translation. Of the 600 visits per day that these courses average, how many of them result in derivations? These, and other questions (such as visitor demographic, global reach, etc.) are things to consider as the OCW project continues to expand and evolve. The future impact of OER lie in the ways information is conceptualized, organized, and related; simply offering up free content on the web is no longer enough—remember David Wiley’s quote from OpenEd 08: “If my students can Google it, I don’t have to teach it.” As progressive models of OER develop and evolve, it will be interesting to see how OCW’s scope and impact also grows.

RecombinaSOM: Brazillian Remix Contest

Cameron Parkins, October 8th, 2008

RecombinaSOM is a remix contest taking place as part of the São Carlos’s Federal University’s multimedia festival, “Contato“. The festival’s theme is recombination and will feature a number of discussions on new forms of licensing and exchanging content among audiovisual/music producers. RecombinaSOM itself will is being hosted by both ccMixter and overmundo, their collective effort being billed Overmixter:

Contato’s theme and curatorial leading concept in this edition is “Recombination” - a remix contest as well as the Creative Commons initiatives (already part of the daily routines of “Radio UFSCar”, one of the Festival promoters), fit well together. Beyond these facts, the copyright debate (one of the debate’s theme of the Festival) will join participants of the multimedia Brazilian website “Overmundo” (Golden Nica - Ars Eletronica winner) and CTS (Centro de Tecnologia e Sociedade da Fundação Getúlio Vargas), an institution that coordinates Creative Commons in Brazil.

The Contest will be host by ‘Overmixter”, a partnership between CCmixter and “Overmundo”, and will bring samples from the bands that are participating in the festival and material from the festival audio identity. The contest organization also will record and share samples during the festival - live presentations at the radio, live material from the gigs and more. 10 remixes chosen by the public will be part of the “Radio UFSCar” daily programming during he following three months and the first place remix chosen will be part of a compilation the station releases once a year called “Transmissoes Independentes” (its first edition is available on Jamendo). The compilation had 2 thousand copies downloaded this year and the media is distributed free of charge.

To find out more about what is going with Creative Commons in Brazil, click here.