A prominent member of the open education community, Stephen Downes is a researcher, blogger, and big thinker in open education and access related issues. He frequently debates with other open education advocates via the medium of the Internet, once in a while meeting up in person at conferences to hash out more of the same.…

Last month, ccLearn published “Otherwise Open: Managing Incompatible Content in OER“. For those of you who never got around to reading the paper, it basically provides an overview of the problem posed by the incorporation of “all-rights-reserved” materials into otherwise open educational resources (OER). It also explores ways of dealing with this problem and the…

Weezie’s Birthday Ballooning by Richard Giles / CC BY-SA Richard Giles, a social media specialist in Australia who frequently posts and CC licenses photos on Flickr, received a threatening letter from the International Olympic Committee last week, mentioning a set of photos he had taken at the 2008 games in Beijing. Giles posted a rundown…

The Software Freedom Law Show, Episode 0x16 contains numerous bits of interest to CC geeks and is well worth a listen. The show’s hosts, Karen Sandler and Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Law Center, discuss among other things: How the GFDL turned out suboptimally — a key point is that developing good public licenses…

I’m happy to announce the launch of this year’s Commoner Letter series – a series of letters written by prominent members of the CC community in support of our annual fundraising campaign. We want to be very clear that this campaign is about much more than raising money for CC. At the heart of it…

DJ Vadim and Creative Commons are celebrating ccMixter‘s fifth anniversary with Secret Mixter October ’09. In this event, the 6th of its kind on ccMixter, starting today, musicians and singers sign up to have their name put into a virtual hat. After the two week sign-up period, everyone is notified, in secret, with a remix…

A little over two years ago award-winning novelist Jon Evans released Beasts Of New York, a self-described “children’s book for adults”, online and for free under our Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license. He chose this license to help facilitate sharing, a decision we elaborated upon previously: Evans wanted to write and release a novel his publishers…

AcaWiki, a project I briefly mentioned in Opening Education–the little things you can do, launches this week. Dubbed as the “Wikipedia for academic research,” AcaWiki’s mission is “to make academic research more accessible and interactive” by “[enabling] users to easily post and discuss human-readable summaries of academic papers and literature reviews online.” Founder Neeru Paharia…

Today marks the launch of Creative Commons’ 5th Annual Fundraising Campaign. This year, more than ever before, it is vital that we all support choice and sharing online. Truly, everyone benefits from a free and open internet, and we have only just begun to see how beneficial a culture of sharing can be. We are…

Wikis Take Manhattan is a scavenger hunt and free content photography contest aimed at illustrating Wikipedia and StreetsWiki articles covering sites and street features in Manhattan and across the five boroughs of New York City. Scheduled for Saturday, October 10, 2009, this event will be a sequel to the spring 2008 Wikipedia Takes Manhattan (WTM-1)…