We encourage you or anyone you know to translate and adapt our productions to your local and lingual context, and upload your translation to the wiki. Open educational resources work because there is a global community around them, and the CC Learn team fervently wishes we were fluent in more than a couple languages. However, we know we have an amazing community of people around the world who believe in the same things we do—so please help promote the movement in your region. Some suggested documents for translation are Open Educational Resources and Creative Commons Licensing, Why CC BY?, and Remixing OER: A Guide to License Compatibility. These are just a few key documents to get people’s feet wet to the idea of OER.

You can also create your own community on OpenED for your local project or region, where ES and Brazilian communities have currently dropped anchors. It’s a wiki as well–so anyone can create an account and start editing.

In the course of production, we found there are certain topics that cannot be distilled to a general audience, mainly because these topics are too specialized, and impractical, for the majority of CC’s user base. We realized that another document series was necessary, one specifically dealing with advanced topics, topics which require additional expertise and address the concerns of a smaller cross section of the OER community. The CC Learn Advanced Topics series, which is not intended for general consumption or to serve as legal advice, aims for this.

The first CC Learn Advanced Topic is CC Licenses and Trademarks: A Guide for Organizational OER Creators and Distributors. This primer distinguishes between copyright and trademark as they pertain to OER, and clarifies some of the confusion surrounding CC licenses and trademarks. For OER organizations with a strong trademark, or with the plans and capacity to build and sustain one, this primer is a guide to understanding the relationship between your organization’s rights as a copyright owner using CC licenses (particularly CC BY) and your organization’s trademark rights within the context of open educational resources (OER). This primer is not relevant for OER creators generally, as trademark law only pertains to those entities with the capacity to build and sustain a brand.

Though CC and CC Learn are open to consulting around business models generally, we are not in a position to give advice around trademark law. This primer is simply an explanation of a separate set of rights you may have to protect your work – trademark rights – while still allowing for the downstream adaptation, translation, and localization of your work that are so central to the goals of OER. Additionally, this primer is an example of one way certain organizations may deal with their concerns, and we hope that it will become an important document in our ongoing work.

All CC Learn Productions are licensed CC BY.

WhippleHill Communications was founded in 1998 and is based in Bedford, New Hampshire. This innovative company provides targeted communications solutions for independent schools seeking next-generation Web services. Like CC, WhippleHill values openness and innovation on the Web, with a particular focus on education, a realm CC is also heavily involved in through ccLearn.

Join WhippleHill in investing in the future of creativity and knowledge. Give what you can today!

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Photo by Chan Wong CC BY-NC

Hello, Fellow Commoner,

Creative Commons licenses make it easier for me to do my work, and to help my faculty and students do theirs. Today I’d like to return the favor and encourage you to support the Creative Commons 2009 Annual Campaign, and help make sure they continue the wonderful work they’ve been doing.

Why is Creative Commons so helpful and important? Because it provides a balanced, sane alternative to the madly out-of-whack copyright system I deal with every day. I am an academic librarian and copyright specialist who teaches faculty, students, librarians, archivists and others about their rights as creators and their rights as users. Anyone familiar with the state of copyright law knows it’s messy and confusing stuff, and the very notion of users’ rights is contentious in some circles. Big Content has been waging a propaganda campaign to convince the public that all unauthorized, un-paid-for uses are infringing, illegal uses. It’s not true, but the widespread misinformation is bad for educators, bad for students, and bad for all of us who benefit from the fruits of scholarly research. Professors are afraid to share educational material with their students. Parents are afraid to let their kids post homemade videos online. All this fear hinders the ability of scholars, teachers, and students to do the work of research, teaching, and learning that is their job.

As my favorite CC video says, “Enter Creative Commons.” Creative Commons carves out an arena in which people can use and build on new works without fear. It frees us from both the looming threat of lawsuits and the time consuming and expensive demands of clearing permissions. Creative Commons helps people share openly, and the more content that CC helps to open up, whether it’s music or photography or scientific data or educational resources, the more it expands what faculty and students can teach and study freely.

I’d like to call particular attention to the work of one of Creative Commons’ offshoots, ccLearn. ccLearn is striving to realize the full potential of the internet to support open learning and open educational resources, and to minimize legal, technical, and social barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials. I cannot overemphasize the importance of this work. In the United States alone, plummeting budgets and rising costs for both K-12 and higher education are making it harder for students and teachers to access the quality educational resources they need. Until recently, most educational content was locked behind digital paywalls or hidden in print books, and the free stuff you could find online was often unreliable. Now, the pool of high quality open educational resources is growing every day, with open textbooks, open courseware, and other experimental projects popping up all the time. Many of these projects have received support from ccLearn, and nearly all of them are built on the framework of Creative Commons licenses. Every one provides expanded access that is crucial to the future of a quality educational system, both in this country and throughout the world.

This is why it is so important to support Creative Commons, in any number of ways. Though I donate (and you should, too), I believe that one of my greatest contributions has been in helping to build the Creative Commons community from the ground up, one frustrated professor or librarian at a time. Every person I teach about Creative Commons is a person who may eventually contribute to the Commons herself, attaching licenses to her works and sharing them with the world. The bigger the Commons, the better for all of us.

Molly Kleinman
Special Assistant to the Dean of Libraries
University of Michigan Library

Article CC BY-NC by Sydney Rock and Rachel Harrus

Remember back in April when I first mentioned Student Journalism 2.0, ccLearn’s pilot project to bring Creative Commons and the power of new media into high school journalism classes? Well since then ccLearn and two SF Bay Area high school journalism classes have been busy getting the ball rolling.

Yesterday, The Paly Voice, the student-run newspaper at Palo Alto High School, announced the integration of CC licenses, allowing its writers to choose to share their articles and op-ed pieces with the world. Already, Sydney Rock and Rachel Harrus’s article announcing the collaboration has gone viral via the CC BY-NC license, as the CC Google Alert picked it up and placed it squarely inside my morning radar. From the article,

“Starting today, readers of The Paly Voice may notice a new graphic — a Creative Commons licensing logo — tagged at the bottom of some stories.

The addition is due to a new collaboration with Creative Commons, a nonprofit corporation that allows published work to be available to the public for fair and legal sharing.

As a part of the Student Journalism 2.0 Project, The Paly Voice, along with the staff of El Estoque, the student news publication of Monta Vista High School, and the staff of The Broadview at Convent of the Sacred Heart High School, is the first high school in the nation to use Creative Commons licensing, which could potentially revolutionize the way creative works are available online.
…
Campanile adviser Esther Wojcicki, who is the chair of the board of directors for Creative Commons, believes that the collaboration will positively influence student journalism at Paly.

“It gives people the legal right to share their story,” Wojcicki said. “It’s like your own PR firm.”

Click to read the full article. For more about Student Journalism 2.0, visit our website, fan our Facebook page, or follow our Twitter.

Today’s predictions about the future of learning might eventually seem as preposterous as early 20th century predictions of flying cars and robot butlers. But what we sometimes forget is that our vision for the future today will ultimately shape the outcomes of tomorrow–not in a causal, deterministic way, but in an enabling way. By sharing our hopes and dreams for an open future for learning, we foster an environment in which it can happen.

At ccLearn, we strongly believe that the future for education and learning is one that includes technical, legal, and social openness.

The spaces in which teaching and learning occur are increasingly moving towards technical openness by running open source software, integrating machine readable metadata, and adopting open formats. Schools, colleges, and universities involved in open courseware, wikis, and other organizations engaged in online knowledge delivery are beginning to embrace RDFa and metadata standards like ccREL, open video codecs, open document formats, and open software solutions. More open technology continues to be developed, and there is no indication that this will stop or slow down.

Members of the global education community have been moving towards legal openness by converging on Creative Commons licenses that allow sustainable redistribution and remixing as the de facto licensing standard. This phenomenon is international- Creative Commons has been ported to 51 countries (7 in progress), with CC licensed educational resources being used all over the world. Although ccLearn found in our recent report “What status for ‘open’?” that some institutions have some homework to do on what it means to be open, we are well on the road towards a robust and scalable legal standard for open educational resources.

Perhaps most powerfully, we are beginning to see a move towards social openness in educational institutions in the prototyping of new models for learning involvement, organization, and assessment that maximizes the availability of learning to all people, everywhere. By leveraging the power of online organization and open content, often times coupled with a willingness to re-conceptualize what it means to be an educator, new possibilities for learning will emerge, leading to a more educated world.

We can’t fully predict today what kinds of practices, pedagogies, and technologies open education will enable tomorrow. But we are in a position to claim that our goal for an open future enables the creation of these new and better practices, technologies, and social structures.

ccLearn would like to thank The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for their continued support of open education, the Creative Commons staff who make our work possible, and all of you for your continued support of a truly global commons. We hope that you all continue to contribute to open source learning software, embrace open formats, license your educational works with Creative Commons licenses, and get engaged in the world movement towards an open future for learning.

La entrada de cierre para el ciclo de ccLearn sobre el regreso al colegio esta nuevamente a cargo de Alex Kozak quien indica como desde ccLearn, se cree firmemente en un futuro del proceso de educación y aprendizaje atravesado por la idea de apertura en lo técnico, lo legal y lo social.

Los espacios en los que la docencia y el aprendizaje se dan para Kozak están migrando a estándares abiertos en con el uso de software open source, integrando metadatos que pueden ser leídos por las máquinas y adoptando formatos abiertos. Escuelas, Universidades y en general instituciones de educación superior que desarrollan courseware abiertos, wikis y otras organizaciones involucradas en los procesos de disponer del conocimiento a través de la red están empezando a adoptar RDFa y estandares de metadatos como ccREL, codecs para video abierto, formatos abiertos de editores de textos, y soluciones de software abierto o libre.

De otro lado la comunidad global del sector educativo se esta moviendo hacia la apertura legal, sus decisiones de adopción de licencias Creative Commons como un estándar converge para permitir la redistribución y mezcla de los recursos . Este es un fenómeno internacional- Creative Commons se ha adaptado al sistema legal de 51 países (7 mas lo están haciendo), los recursos educativos licenciados con CC se usan por todo el mundo. En todo caso se debe considerar que ccLearn encontró en su informe “What status for ‘open’?” que algunas instituciones todavía tienen que revisar lo que significa abierto, pero que el camino hacia estándares de apertura en los recursos educativos esta en marcha.

Para Kozak incluso lo llamativo es que se esta empezando a ver una mayor apertura en lo social en relación con los pilotos educativos en los nuevos modelos que las instituciones ensayan. A la hora de abordar el proceso de aprendizaje, la organizacion, y valoracion de estos pilotos están maximizando la idea de hacerlo accesible a cualquiera en cualquier lugar. Kozak cree que apalancando la capacidad de las organizaciones en linea y del contenido abierto, junto con el cada vez mas frecuente deseo de re-conceptualizar lo que significa ser docente, nuevas posibilidades para el aprendizaje surgirán para llevarnos a un mundo mas educado.

Para Kozak aunque no podamos predecir las practicas, pedagogías y tecnologías que favorecerá una educación abierta mañana si podemos decir que la meta de un futuro abierto permitirá la creación de esas nuevas practicas, tecnologías y estructuras sociales.

Breve comentario desde mi propia óptica

Aunque en regiones como América Latina nos hacen falta datos para asumir como ciertas muchas de las afirmaciones de Kozak para el mundo anglosajón lo cierto es que la sensación que hay en el ambiente es que muchas de sus conclusiones pueden ser extensibles a nuestra realidad,

De hecho algunos otras de las entradas de este ciclo de regreso al colegio que hizo ccLearn se referían a proyectos concretos que mostraban proyectos y practicas abiertas (Vital signs y el caso de los libros de texto). Creo que deberíamos visibilizar algunas de las muchas iniciativas que están ocurriendo en nuestra región para conocerlas y aprender de ellas… espero poder hacerlo muy pronto! (si tienen ideas dejen su comentario y hagamos seguimiento de ellas juntos)

Years from now, what will it mean for teachers to prep for a new school-year? Will they be reviewing digital textbooks? Collaborating online with colleagues in revising and adapting digital lesson plans? Upgrading operating systems and software on classroom laptops? Scouring the net for those perfect open educational materials to print or distribute to students?

Everyone might have their own image of how preparation for a new school year will look, but the current excitement about open and digital educational resources indicates that teachers are ready for a new model.

As textbooks and learning materials move online, the copyright status of those resources becomes more important to teachers. At ccLearn, the education program at Creative Commons, we strongly believe that developing a global education commons of openly licensed educational resources is the best solution to the legal and technical challenges that teachers face when trying to share and adapt educational resources. But how exactly will teachers be able to find and share open educational resources? After all, a resource simply being accessible online isn’t itself enough for it to be easily discoverable.

ccLearn has developed a prototype search engine, DiscoverEd, that provides one solution to this challenge.

DiscoverEd provides scalable search and discovery for educational resources on the web. Results come from institutional and third-party repositories who have expended time and resources curating metadata about resources. These curators either create or aggregate educational resources and maintain information about them. Metadata, including the license and subject information available, are exposed in the result set.

We are particularly interested in open educational resources (OER) and are collaborating with other OER projects to improve search and discovery capabilities for OER, using DiscoverEd and other available tools.

Our search engine is a prototype and shouldn’t been seen as the only solution to OER search and discovery. But assuming that categorization and assessment of OER are embedded at the point of publication as open metadata, the DiscoverEd model is a powerful and scalable method for discovering and utilizing those data.

To learn more about DiscoverEd, you can explore the DiscoverEd site, FAQ, or read our report entitled “Enhanced Search for Educational Resources: A Perspective and a Prototype from ccLearn“.

You can also test out our DiscoverEd widget below:

En esta entrada Alex Kozak aborda la solución que ofrece ccLearn, el programa educativo de Creative Commnons, para apoyar los problemas legales y técnicos que enfrentan los profesores cuando buscan recursos digitales y abiertos en el universo de Internet donde encontrar no es tan sencillo. Se trata del buscador piloto DiscoverEd que busca enfrentar este reto.

DiscoverEd es un buscador para recursos educativos en la red. El buscador revisa repositorios de terceros que han dedicado tiempo y esfuerzo a curar los metadatos de los recursos. Estos curadores crean o cosechan los recursos y conservan la información sobre ellos en metadatos, incluyendo la información sobre la licencia y el tema que es presentada como resultado en el proceso de búsqueda.

DiscoverEd se ocupa esencialmente de proyectos abiertos, de Recursos Educativos Abiertos (REA o OER por sus siglas en ingles) y colabora con otros proyectos de este tipo para mejorar los resultados en la búsqueda y descubrimiento de estos recursos..

Kosak finaliza indicando que este es un piloto que no debe ser visto como la única solución para la búsqueda y descubrimiento de REA pero, considerando que la categorización y valoración de los recursos se hace en el punto de publicación a través de metadatos abiertos, cree que DiscoverEd sera un modelo poderoso y escalable para encontrar y usar los datos.

La información sobre el proyecto esta por ahora en ingles, puede revisarse en DiscoverEd site, FAQ, o en el informe “Enhanced Search for Educational Resources: A Perspective and a Prototype from ccLearn”

With the production of this white paper, we would like to officially announce the launch of DiscoverEd. Entirely open source, DiscoverEd is an experimental project from ccLearn which attempts to provide scalable search and discovery for educational resources on the web. Metadata, including the license and subject information available, are exposed in the result set.

As noted above, DiscoverEd has been discussed at a few meetings already, so this launch is mainly to help spread the word and to spark additional conversation. If you are an educator or anyone else looking for educational resources, it is available for immediate use and we welcome your feedback.

We want to emphasize that DiscoverEd is a prototype intended to explore how structured data may be used to enhance the search experience. We are by no means launching this as a definitive tool; in fact, we intend just the opposite. We are launching this so that others in the search and discovery space can contribute to this project. There are a number of known issues which we would love help on, especially since we think the community’s input and work should go into shaping future versions of this tool. This tool is currently intended for educational resources, but there is no reason anyone can’t take and adapt it for other purposes.

Where do the search results come from?

Results come from institutional and third party repositories who have expended time and resources curating the metadata. These curators either create or aggregate educational resources and maintain information about them. If you’re a producer or curator of educational resources and would like to be included in the search contact us. If you’re an educator, we want to hear from you. What works for you? What’s broken? What can be improved?

It was a whirlwind of a time, and it was clear that everyone was excited about the pace of development and the promise of open translation for building cultural bridges, facilitating the free exchange of ideas, and empowering those who are not able to participate in the current linguistically and technologically dominant paradigms. Look for additional information on host Aspiration Tech’s site, and check out the new manual on open translation tools which was generated by a book sprint immediately following the conference.

If this meeting was any indication, we suspect that the benefits of permitting translations (through the application of an appropriate CC license, for example) will quickly be matched with both software and communities poised to leverage those permissions. Can we imagine a world where the language of origin serves to authenticate communications rather than hampering them?

Now we’ve tried something new. For our latest Inside OER, IssueLab’s Lisa Brooks on Opening Up Research, we decided to make our own adaptation, lifting the complete text of the interview and remixing it with images, screen shots, and speech bubbles. Drawing extensively from resources in the public domain, CC licensed photos on Flickr, and the help of a handy application known as Comic Life, we give you our very first issue of Inside OER, the Comic.

Hopefully, this will not only grab but sustain short attention spans. IssueLab, in particular, is doing great things for the open education community and Lisa is especially apt at articulating exactly what that is and what they are aiming for.

The comic is licensed CC BY, of course, so share and derive away! You can also remix the text version at CC Talks With.