PBS TeacherSource blogger Andy Carvin has a great article on Encouraging Student Creativity with Creative Commons:

I’m often amazed by the lack of discussion in education technology circles about copyright. Sure, people talk about it occasionally, but given the increasing number of young people (read: millions of them) uploading their own content to the Internet, it surprises me how many educators don’t make a point at teaching copyright basics to students. That’s why I thought it would be worth spending a little time talking about the issue and an amazing online initiative that every Internet-using educator should know about: Creative Commons.

Carvin uses a CC license for his own work:

Because of this license, people from all over the world are able to utilize my content for whatever purposes they want, as long as it follows these basic rules. For example, a museum in Georgia recently used one of my videos for an exhibit they were curating on West African textiles. They were nice enough to contact me about it, but they didn’t have to – the CC license laid out my expectations, and they could use the video immediately as long as those expectations were followed. Almost every week I get an email from an educator asking to use some piece of media I’ve published, and I always tell them, “No need to ask,” pointing them to my CC license. You can almost see the lightbulbs going off in their heads when they figure out how the license works.

Read the whole article. Also see PBS MediaShift’s article on CC and reuse.