Free Culture Forum is October 29th – November 1st in Barcelona!

Fred Benenson, October 26th, 2009

If you’re anywhere near Barcelona this coming weekend, you should seriously consider attending the Free Culture Forum:

Across the planet, people are recognizing the need for an international space to build and coordinate a global framework and common agenda for issues surrounding free culture and access to knowledge. The Free Culture Forum of Barcelona aims to create such a space. Bringing together under the same roof the key organizations and active voices in the free culture and knowledge space, the Forum will be a meeting point to sit and put together the answers to the pressing questions behind the present paradigm shift.

Representatives from Creative Commons Spain, Students for Free Culture and Wikimedia will be in attendance (among many others), so it’ll be a great opportunity to meet plenty of people in our community. Registration is free and open to the public, but there are more details on how to get involved here.

Jeeran Launches a Dedicated Creative Commons Channel

Fred Benenson, October 16th, 2009

Jeeran, the largest Arabic online community with 1.5 million registered users and more than 7 million visitors per month, has just launched a dedicated Creative Commons space to inform the developing CC Arab community with articles, news and updates about CC activities in the region. While a large commons culture is still developing in the Arab world, the new Jeeran channel should help provide valuable information to Arab users how to license and share their work online.

The ultimate goal of the channel is to foster new CC content creation and dissemination of content in the Arabic language. This is really a fantastic opportunity for the budding CC community in the Middle East because Jeeran has done so much work in the domain of Arabic content creation and language preservation on the Internet. For an example, check out their their innovative project called as Seejal which is transferring an old Arab tradition of poetry onto the web.

The CC channel on Jeeran will feature blog posts, videos, caricatures and music, as well as successful case studies on how Creative Commons is being used in the Arab Region (e.g., the Creative Commons Al Jazeera repository). The channel will also contain a section on news and updates on Creative Commons events, meetings and happenings in the Arab Region like the upcoming Jordan launch and CC Salon.

We’d like to thank Laith and Omar, founders of Jeeran, their team, Rami Olwan and Bassel Safadi from our CC Arab community for making this happen!

- Donatella Della Ratta (donatella@creativecommons.org)

Back to School Conclusion: The Open Trajectory of Learning

Alex Kozak, September 4th, 2009

As students around the world return to school, ccLearn blogs about the evolving education landscape, ongoing projects to improve educational resources, education technology, and the future of education. Browse the “Back to School” tag for more posts in this series.

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)

OneWebDay 2009 is September 22nd

Fred Benenson, September 1st, 2009

It is September again, and that means OneWebDay is just around the corner on September 22nd. One Web Day is a once-a-year celebration of all that is good about the Web, and was launched in 2006 by Susan Crawford. You might recognize Susan’s name as President Obama’s Special Assistant for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy. While Susan is now at the White House, dozens of teams around the world are preparing ready for the festivities, so check out OneWebdDay’s map or sign up to start your own team here.

One Web. For All.

This year’s One Web Day theme is “One Web. For All.” And while that might seem like an obvious theme for a day celebrating the Web, it’s an unfortunate reality that the Web isn’t yet available to everyone everywhere. Though this fact is changing as more of the world gets online, we’ve still got a ways to go. Making sure the web is for everyone is also a goal shared by Creative Commons. We’ve designed our tools and licenses to work internationally, regardless of jurisdiction or language. But it also means we’ve translated our licenses into the languages of dozens of different jurisdictions. For more information on our international efforts, check out our international page.

Making sure the web is for everyone is also about making sure everyone can participate. And that means open standards, low transaction costs, and transparent policies. Efforts like the push for network neutrality amongst ISPs are crucial components to maintaining that the web remains open for all.

So on September 22nd, celebrate OneWebDay by taking some time to think about how important it is that we can all participate in the web and how that fact has fundamentally changed our society.

Slovak Republic

Michelle Thorne, September 1st, 2009

CC Ireland discusses Version 3.0, invites comments

Michelle Thorne, June 5th, 2009

On behalf of CC Ireland, we are pleased to announce the draft of CC BY-NC-SA adapted to Irish law (PDF) is now in public discussion. The CC Ireland team, lead by Dr. Darius Whelan and Louise Crowley and hosted at the University College Cork, has been working with Creative Commons International to port the licenses to local copyright legislation. Prior to this work, the Irish team prepared its national licenses at Version 2.0; however, Creative Commons introduced Version 3.0 before CC Ireland launched. Since that time, the Irish team has been developing Version 3.0 licenses and addressing pertinent legal issues.

The public discussion is a key part of Creative Commons’ license porting project. It is an opportunity for you, content creators and license users, to engage in the drafting process and give your input on this collaborative effort. We warmly invite you to join CC Ireland’s discussion list or visit their website and share your comments with local and international legal experts.

Thank you and congratulations to CC Ireland!

Latam Commons 2008 is a Success

Jane Park, December 1st, 2008

Latam Commons 2008: The Public Domain, Creative Commons, and Open Education in Latin America, held Nov 19-21 in Santiago, Chile, was a great success. The event was co-hosted and excellently managed by NGO Derechos Digitales, and representatives from all over Latin America were present and actively participated in the meeting. Project Leads of Creative Commons jurisdictions first held a one-day meeting to discuss their projects, possible strategic initiatives and collaborations across the region, and shared challenges. These conversations are just the beginning of what is planned to become a regular regional gathering to leverage the expertise and resources that are distributed throughout the region. The next day was devoted to a highly interactive “unconference” on open education which brought together leading international advocates for open education with key figures in libraries and ministries of education in Chile and beyond. The goal of the meeting was to gather information regarding top concerns and key projects involved in the growth of the open education movement, to be synthesized and then leveraged for collaborative opportunities both within and beyond the region. Look for a report on this event in the coming months. Finally, Derechos Digitales orchestrated a seminar on the public domain which included cutting-edge research reports and discussions regarding the legal and practical elements of both defining and utilizing the public domain in Latin America. The philosophical and legal issues pertinent to consideration of the public domain is clearly of broad interest in the region, and we are hopeful that these ideas will continue to serve as organizing themes for ongoing conversation and action to enhance access to knowledge and improved scholarship in the future.

Additional details will be forthcoming from ccLearn, CCi, and Derechos Digitales.

IE Business School Opens Up Multimedia

Jane Park, October 30th, 2008

IE Business School, an international leader in business, offers masters and doctorate degrees via an innovative blend of in-class and online course methods. Though its central campus is in Madrid, the school caters to students from more than 65 countries around the world, and recently it has opened up its multimedia documentation to everyone else. 

“IE develops multimedia documentation for both online and face to face courses. More than one hundred modules across all management areas have been developed in house. These modules include multimedia case studies, simulations, online games, interactive graphs and exercises.”

The multimedia is offered in both Spanish and English and is released online under CC BY-NC-ND.

CC and ccLearn at OCWC 2008 in Dalian, China

Jon Phillips, May 2nd, 2008

I just wrote a big post up on my appearance at the big Open Educational Resources conference OpenCourseWare Conference 2008 in Dalian. It is cut apart below:

Jose speaking about Knowledge Hub at the Open Ed conference in Dalian, China, Photo by Tom Caswell

I just arrived back home in Guangzhou, China from the OpenCourseWare Conference in Dalian, China last weekend and met many great people (but don’t have the tolerance to write out the contents of my thoughts ;), had many fruitful discussions, and rocked out a good slide deck for ccLearn (and you!). Check out my presentation (or any of my presentations and here), “OER XinXai (NOW!).

The most fruitful part of the conference for me was interacting with Philip Schmidt, Victor from Hewlett Foundation, Chunyan Wang from CC Mainland China, and Stewart Cheifet from Internet Archive. Also, hearing about sustain-o-bility in all its forms as a major consideration for projects, and mentions of CC+, made me quite happy. It also served as a nice place to test out my Mandarin skills for the good or worse of things. Hopefully at the next conference there will be more time for discussion during the conference days.

I jumped up on stage to give a final call for participation to the ccLearn and OER regional meeting at iSummit July 29 – August 1 in order to increase participation by principals in the region. Let’s hope it worked!

After this conference, I directly headed to Beijing where I worked with CC Mainland China team on accelerating business development and assessing great projects which would be great to integrate Creative Commons licensing. If you have an organization in China or any jurisdiction and want to help in this process, check out the page CC Web Integration.

The next stop for me is to head to celebrate Lu’s 27th birthday on May 4th, then onto Japan to meet up Joi, Catharina, Fumi and more (ken!). Then back to Guangzhou, Beijing, then back to Guangzhou, then back in San Francisco May 21 through at least end of July as homebase. Cheers!