In other news:

• The limited edition “Share” shirts designed by the Imaginary Foundation are running out. Get yours now!
• We now have a CC-curated page on Kickstarter! Check out all the cool projects that use our tools.
• R.E.M. launched a CC remix contest for “It Happened Today.” Upload your remix at SoundCloud.
• Remember that $2 billion fund for open education? Here’s the low-down for grant applicants.
• We published two policy reports: Creative Commons and Public Sector Information: Flexible tools to support PSI creators and re-users and State of Play: Public Sector Information in the United States.
• We signed an open letter to Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff in support of CC and the work of the Brazilian society and government for the cultural commons.
• Despite the unrest in the middle east, our Lebanese community is taking off!
• We reached an open movie milestone with the 4k release of Sintel under CC BY.
• And finally something to forward to all your educator friends: Open Content Licensing 4 Educators, a free online workshop on CC licensing, open educational resources, and copyright that starts March 21st.

If you are serious about a Creative Commons project idea, you may be interested in the free, online course, “Getting your CC project funded,” set to run in April. The course consists of a series of workshops and seminars that will take you through the steps from an initial idea to having a finished project proposal for submission, including assistance in identifying and finding funding bodies and collaborations relevant for your project. You provide the idea; the course provides the guidance to turn it into a proposal that can’t be refused.

The course will be run by Jonas Öberg from the Nordic CC network, a lecturer at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden with extensive grant writing and reviewing experience with the European Commission and several Nordic cultural foundations. “Getting your CC project funded” will run on the Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) in April, and we especially invite CC Affiliates and friends to participate!

As with all P2PU courses, the course is free to take. Though only 15 active participants will be accepted into the course, the entire course, material, and other information, including the proposals which you write in the course, will be open for anyone to follow on the P2PU platform under the CC BY-SA license.

You can read more at http://p2pu.org/general/getting-your-cc-project-funded. You may start brainstorming at anytime, but official sign-up opens March 31.

If you already have experience writing and reviewing funding proposals… you may be interested in joining the team of expert external reviewers. More info on the current team is available on our wiki. If interested, please contact Jonas directly or janepark [at] creativecommons [dot] org. Though the course itself will be run in English, project proposals may be written and reviewed in English, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Russian and Bulgarian. More languages may be added depending on the final team of reviewers.

Badge prototypes by P2PU & Mozilla / CC BY-SA

Getting students formal credit for their free and open education is a challenge, but groups and institutions are working around the world to come up with alternative pathways to recognition. The Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) is one such group that explored the topic in an assessment workshop last September and then co-designed virtual “badges” for recognition in real time at the Mozilla Drumbeat Festival in Barcelona. P2PU and Mozilla are piloting these badges via the P2PU School of Webcraft, and have solicited would-be developers for the skills and competencies that would best be reflected by a badge system. In collaboration with the MacArthur Foundation, they have drafted An Open Badge System Framework: A foundational piece on assessment and badges (Google doc).

A meeting to build an OER University

Alternatives, such as the badge system above, may factor into a plan to bring formal recognition to open education learners’ achievements. In an effort to combine institutional forces, the Open Educational Resources (OER) Foundation will host an international planning meeting on February 23 to co-design assessment and credit pathways for open learning. As open educational resources (OER) under CC licenses become more integrated into institutional education, the OER foundation (along with Otago Polytechnic in New Zealand, the University of Southern Queensland in Australia, and Athabasca University in Canada) is hoping to “provide flexible pathways for OER learners to earn formal academic credit and pay reduced fees for assessment and credit.”

The challenge is to find robust mechanisms for academic credit for these OER learners. “Students seek flexible study opportunities, but they also want their achievements recognised in credible credentials.” said Sir John Daniel, President of the Commonwealth of Learning. “This important meeting will tackle the challenges of combining flexibility with rigour, which requires clarity in conception and quality in execution.”

The OER Foundation invites and encourages all post-secondary institutions and others “who care about sharing knowledge as a core value of education” to join the meeting, which will be streamed virtually by UNESCO to enable participation by all.

The foundation believes “OER is a sustainable and renewable resource,” but that “collaboration among education institutions will be a prerequisite for success.”

Learn more about the OER for Assessment & Credit for Students Project and see UNESCO’s announcement for more information.

Since we last blogged about CC in Barcelona, we’ve been very productive. Two weeks worth of open events have yielded several talks around open educational resources (OER) search, discovery, and policy at Open Ed, recommendations and tools for greater open content reuse at the Mozilla Drumbeat Festival, and a 12 month plan for the future of the Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU).

Open Ed 2010

In addition to an excellent talk by board member Cathy Casserly, CC staff members Nathan Yergler and Timothy Vollmer both gave talks that led to fruitful side conversations that will be helpful going forward. Nathan’s talk on “Search and Discovery: OER’s Open Loop” spurred conversations about one of the underlying issues of OER search, which is, “how do you (software, crawlers) know what’s an OER and what is not?” Timothy Vollmer’s talk on the “iNACOL survey: An inquiry into OER projects, practices, and policy in U.S. K-12 schools” identified how OER is being used in K-12 online education and investigated the existing OER models at the state, district, and school level. The survey revealed the widespread knowledge of OER among the respondents, but also ongoing questions about the funding models and professional development needs to alert other teachers and administrators about the process and benefits of exploring OER. On the whole, survey respondents were optimistic about the potential for OER, wanting to see it implemented for a wide variety of functions, including the development of digital textbooks to replace hard copy texts, as a component in building better assessment mechanisms, to augment learning materials for struggling students, credit recovery, independent study, college prep and tutoring, special education, library tutorials, and to provide opportunities for students to engage in content and classes that the school doesn’t offer.

CC BY by tvol

Mozilla Drumbeat Festival: Learning, Freedom, and the Web

CEO Joi Ito gave a keynote and CC’s International Project Manager (and Drumbeat Festival program co-chair) Michelle Thorne worked closely with Mark Surman and other Mozillans to make this event happen–a huge shout-out to all the Mozilla volunteers! The Peer Learning Lighthouse tent, organized by CC Superhero Delia Browne, Alison Jean Cole (P2PU), and myself, focused specifically on overcoming barriers to reuse of CC licensed content and a future School of Copyright & Creative Commons at P2PU. One of the coolest outcomes of this tent was tech specifications around a CC attribution generator, a browser and platform plugin that would export the metadata around a CC licensed work to produce a formatted attribution. University of Michigan’s Molly Kleinman and our CTO Nathan Yergler, in collaboration with Mozilla, are working to make this tool a reality. Discussions on the School of Copyright & Creative Commons revolved around increasing global and linguistic reach of the Copyright for Educators courses, and also adapting the course for librarians, policymakers, and creators.

P2PU Workshop

All P2PU-produced content is under CC BY-SA. In order to more effectively educate P2PU participants and course organizers, the P2PU community are planning to integrate copyright and CC license education into its orientation process, in addition to emphasizing the P2PU value of openness as part of a “social contract” at the beginning of every course, which will be revised to explicitly call out the license. Additionally, the revamped P2PU platform will introduce values and licensing in the latest stage at the sign-up phase.

CC BY-SA by kiyanwang

Of course licensing was far from the only issue that was talked about. Governance, nonprofit incorporation, sustainability, course formats and content, quality control, research, and more were heavily workshopped, and all outcomes from the workshop are available at the P2PU wiki, under CC BY-SA of course. Immediately after the workshop, the P2PU techsprint, involving volunteer developers and designers, produced the next iteration of the P2PU platform–which you can preview here.

CC is making a strong presence in Barcelona at the many open culture and education events that are taking place in the next couple weeks. Board members Catherine Casserly and Esther Wojcicki, CEO Joi Ito, CTO Nathan Yergler, International Project Manager Michelle Thorne, Open Society Foundation (OSF) Policy Fellow Timothy Vollmer, myself, and a slew of CC Affiliates from all over will be participating in the Open Ed Conference, first Mozilla Drumbeat Festival, Free Culture Forum/oXcars, and Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) Workshop. Some preview highlights and invitations to join us at specific events:

Mozilla Drumbeat Learning, Freedom and the Web Festival (3-5 Nov)
The Mozilla Drumbeat Festival “will gather teachers, learners and technologists from around the world who are at the heart of [the open] revolution.” It will consist of designated spaces, or “tents”, with specific focuses, like building peer-2-peer courses (part of the Peer Learning Lighthouse), designing badges to recognize informal learning (Badge Lab), and fusing Wikipedia with education (Wikipedia lounge). You can check out the evolving schedule here, but we’ll be hosting the following spaces, where we encourage you to join us:

Encourage Content Reuse: Educate your users! (4-5 Nov)
This session addresses the lack of education around openly licensed content and its associated freedoms–how to use, adapt, and remix content to realize the full collaborative potential that is enabled by CC licenses. We will discuss, collaborate, and create educational resources for users of open content. Specific outcomes include a reuse/remix guide for P2PU or other content and DIY license tutorials. The reuse/remix guide will lay the foundation for a “reusable” template that other initiatives can customize to educate their users. DIY license tutorials can be on the “open” subject of your choice, whether it’s a particular CC license, open educational resources (OER) in general, what is “open” anyway?, or org-specific policy (ie. why did P2PU choose CC BY-SA?) in the form of short video, pictures, or design—basically, how would you explain open licensing to your parents?

Building a School of Copyright & Creative Commons (4-5 Nov)
Building on P2PU’s Copyright 4 Educators courses, this is a planning session to discuss how to extend the current network of educators of copyright and Creative Commons. This may involve issues such as recruitment for more course facilitators, collaboration with CC affiliates around the world, and building a “School of Copyright and Creative Commons” at P2PU that would serve as the umbrella for all related courses and programs around copyright education. What other audiences besides educators should we focus on, and how do we leverage the international network of CC affiliates to reach more jurisdictions?

In addition to the above, Joi will be giving the opening keynote to the festival. The full (also evolving) list of drumbeat activities is available at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Drumbeat/events/Festival/program/activities.

Open Ed 2010 (2-4 Nov)
The annual Open Ed conference is “the world’s premiere venue for research related to open education” and this year’s theme is “OER: Impact and Sustainability”. Board member Catherine Casserly will present “Open Educational Resources and the Bull’s-Eye: Opening Access to Knowledge AND Improving Teaching and Learning,” CTO Nathan Yergler will lead a session on “Search and Discovery: OER’s Open Loop,” which focuses on DiscoverEd, a prototype for scalable search of educational resources online, and OSF Policy Fellow Timothy Vollmer will present the “iNACOL survey: An inquiry into OER projects, practices, and policy in U.S. K-12 schools.”

P2PU Workshop 2010 (27-30 Oct)
The second P2PU workshop will focus on the future of the Peer 2 Peer University, including issues of education around open licensing, accreditation, community norms and review processes, governance, sustainability, larger “schools” of courses, and general peer-produced mayhem. Active workshoppers include Neeru Paharia (former CC Executive Director) and myself, in addition to a “friends of P2PU” day where CC board member Catherine Casserly will contribute her expertise and support.

Free Culture Forum and oXcars 2010 (28-31 Oct)
The Free Culture Forum is “an international arena in which to build and coordinate action around issues related to free/libre culture and access to knowledge.” It “brings together key organizations and active voices in the spheres of free/libre culture and knowledge, and provides a meeting point where we can find answers to the pressing questions behind the current paradigm shift.” oXcars 2010 is the free culture awards ceremony that will take place at the beginning of the forum, recognizing international artists and performers, including those of Spanish culture.

Barcelona was also host to the sixth COMMUNIA workshop earlier this month, which focused on “Memory Institutions and Public Domain.”

We hope to see you at one or all of these events, and if not, stay tuned for updates in November.

P2PU is simultaneously launching its School of Webcraft, which is a collaboration with the Mozilla Foundation and “is a powerful new way to learn open, standards based web development in a collaborative environment. School of Webcraft courses include Beginning Python Webservices and HTML5.”

In addition, Creative Commons Counsel Lila Bailey is co-facilitating the Copyright for Educators course this round, which will focus on United States law. The course is “for educators who want to learn about copyright, open content material and licensing” and “is taught around practical case studies faced by teachers when using copyright material in their day to day teaching and educational instruction.” For more information, see the course page.

Sign-ups for all other courses are available at http://p2pu.org/course/list. The deadline to sign up is September 8, and courses will run until October 27th. All courses are free to take and openly licensed under CC BY-SA. For more information, see the full announcement, but stay tuned for more courses!

Following on the delivery model developed by P2PU, course organizers volunteer to take existing open learning materials or develop their own content and lead a group of peers through 6 weeks of online classes. Courses focus on project based learning in a peer environment and are proposed, created and led by members of the web development community – so the content will always be up to date with the latest technologies.

We’d love for you to become a part of this project and until July 18 we’re inviting course proposals for P2PU School of Webcraft. We’ve made it really easy to get started, just fill out the proposal form, it takes less than 5 minutes!

The school is completely free and open, with all P2PU produced material licensed under CC BY-SA—which means anyone can build on the courses and run their own. But anyone can also get involved with P2PU by proposing a course or participating in one, or just learning more. You can also check out the School of Webcraft in 103 seconds.

Digital Journalism 2010 is “an introduction to online journalism, citizen media and the use of social networks for journalism and collective action. Participants will work on self defined projects either as individuals or in groups using any combination of media types including video, photographs, illustrations and text as well as online tools such as blogs, wikis, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and any other reasonable tool the participant or team would like to use.” In addition to learning about how the journalism landscape is rapidly changing, participants will learn to research and create news online by publishing stories of their own in teams. These stories will be presented to the class (and the world).

The course is a work in progress, so the community can contribute by suggesting readings, activities, and more. P2PU is looking for course organizers to facilitate the P2PU end of things. If interested, please contact thepeople [at] p2pu.org. To participate in the course remotely via P2PU, you can sign up to apply at www.p2pu.org/journalism. Sign-up is open now and the course will begin on Friday, 4 June.

Joi teaches Digital Journalism annually as part of the Keio Graduate School of Media Design. He has contributed pieces to the New York Times, the Asian Wall Street Journal, and Wired. He is also a prolific photographer and if you didn’t already know, the CEO of Creative Commons.

The Peer 2 Peer University is “a grassroots education project that organizes learning outside of institutional walls.” In addition to leveraging existing OER, P2PU licenses all of its own courses under CC BY-SA. For more on why P2PU chose this license, visit http://p2pu.org/license.

P2PU has always been committed to openness in everything we do, from the way we run our activities, to how we licence the materials we produce. However, as many people who have worked in the Open Educational space will attest, choosing the right kind of licence, one that provides both the protections and the freedoms that a project like P2PU may require, can be a tricky process…

As we went through the process, we also realised that our experiences may be useful for other people who are undergoing a similar exercises. So we decided to document what we did, and why, and how it turned out. And today, we are proud to announce the publication of our Guide to Choosing an Open Licence (with a CC licence, of course!) In this document, you’ll find details of every step we took to choose our licence, and a range of opinions from several open educators, lawyers and practitioners which we found invaluable.

The P2PU experience is only one of many, and it is not necessarily the process or the license that everyone should choose. It is simply one example of a process that worked for a diverse community of people with various viewpoints. In the end, they chose CC BY-SA (with the allowance of CC BY for when content is entirely funded by a third party). The document is thorough, objective, helpful, and not very long–so make sure to check it out, especially if you’re wondering how to go about choosing a CC license for your own project. (The document itself is available via CC BY-SA).

• Flat World Knowledge (as mentioned earlier today),
• Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU),
• and a dynamic panel of K-12 technologists and educators (my personal favorite from the event).

All videos are available via CC BY, of course. I’d also like to point out that the Hewlett OER Grantees meeting is going on right now, which you can follow with the hashtag #oerhf.