The Textmapping Project

Matt Haughey, August 28th, 2003

The Textmapping Project is a site aiming to improve reading comprehension by providing tutorials for teachers, homeschoolers, and education researchers. The practice of textmapping involves creating large scrolls containing information. Information presented in this way allows students to get an idea of the “big picture” and helps them figure out ways of gleaning relevant information and themes in a larger work, among many other benefits.

The site itself has a comprehensive copyright section explaining how to use their content and how to give them proper attribution in accordance with the Creative Commons license, and they even include the HTML that users can copy and paste to their documents. They also have an explanation of why they chose the license and offer a list of other licenses that educational researchers may be interested in.

As the Classics go Public

Matt Haughey, August 28th, 2003

Book Magazine recently published a list of the 50 best-selling classics in 2002, and blogger Eliot Landrum decided to improve upon it. He looked up the date that every book on the list is set to go into the public domain in the US (10 of the 50 already are), and republished the list here.

I can’t wait to see what kinds of great side-stories, reinterpretations, and movies get created after Tolkien’s, Steinbeck’s, and Hemingway’s work goes free.

Care to Remix? Visit Common Content

Neeru Paharia, August 28th, 2003

There is a lot of great Creative Commons licensed work at Common Content — much of it — licensed to allow you, to remix and make derivative works.

If you are entering the Creative Commons Moving Image Contest, Common Content would be a good source of seed material to remix as part of your entry. 

If you have Creative Commons licensed works, register at Common Content — that way people will be able to find your work to remix, or share.  

Creative Commons Moving Image Contest

Neeru Paharia, August 28th, 2003

GET CREATIVE!

Enter the Creative Commons Moving Image Contest.

Make a 2-minute moving image that describes Creative Commons’ mission.

Win a computer, a digital video camera, or an iPod.

An amazing panel of judges will select winners.

Please read the official rules.

More on iCommons Finland

Glenn Otis Brown, August 28th, 2003

Our friends at HIIT in Finland have added an English explanation of their proposed changes for porting the Creative Commons licenses to Finland.

MIT Everyware

Matt Haughey, August 26th, 2003

The September issue of Wired Magazine features an article called “MIT Everyware” about the OpenCourseWare project, which aims to offer material from every course at MIT, all under a Creative Commons license. As the article suggests, various educational organizations around the world have sprung up to help translate and disseminate the materials. Here’s a translation of the Creative Commons license used in Vietnam’s OpenCourseWare material, for students such as the one described in Ho Chi Minh City. Creative Commons co-founder and board member Hal Abelson is also quoted in the article.

WikiTravel

Matt Haughey, August 21st, 2003

This week’s featured content is a new site called WikiTravel that takes an innovative, community approach to sharing travel information. The site is based on a Wiki, which is a bit of web software that allows anyone to edit and create new pages, giving a community of interested users the power to expand the content of a site in any direction. Current hot topics include a great set of tips on flying and tips for driving in Australia.

To go along with the multi-author, community spirit of the site, the contents are licensed under a Creative Commons license, allowing anyone to reprint, modify, and even use the content commercially.

Lawrence Solum on Copynorms

Matt Haughey, August 15th, 2003

Lawrence Solum runs the Legal Theory Blog and recently wrote a piece on “Copynorms”, the “informal social attitudes about the rightness or wrongness of duplicating material that is copyrighted.” He describes a few scenarios that might come out of the recording industry’s pending lawsuits against filetraders, and what effect (if any) that will have on Copynorms.

The Speech Accent Archive

Matt Haughey, August 14th, 2003

A great new audio project worth highlighting is the Speech Accent Archive at George Mason University. It features 264 native and non-native speakers reading the same paragraph in english. Ever wonder what a Romanian from Bucharest sounds like in relation to a Boston accent? Look no further, as it is all released under a Creative Commons License.

Raymond vanderWoning’s Photos

Matt Haughey, August 13th, 2003

This week we’re featuring the photography of Raymond A. vanderWoning. His photos feature subjects from flowers and bugs to signs and people and his about page carries a thoughtful piece on how and why he licenses all his photos. A hobbyist photographer at heart, Raymond’s closing statement gets to the heart of it all:

Information doesn’t want to be free, it wants to be shared.