In January I blogged about Blackboard xpLor — a new cloud-based learning object repository that was being piloted at 70 institutions. Blackboard officially released it today, giving educators the ability to discover, create, and share resources across learning management systems (LMS). As part of its launch, xpLor has integrated support for CC license options for…

*Board of directors: Hal Abelson, Paul Brest, Glenn Brown, Michael Carroll, Catherine Casserly, Caterina Fake, Brian Fitzgerald, Davis Guggenheim, Joi Ito, Lawrence Lessig, Laurie Racine, Eric Saltzman, Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, Annette Thomas, Jimmy Wales, and Esther Wojcicki. Nathan Colquhoun / CC BY-NC-SA The Creative Commons Board of Directors is seeking recommendations from the Creative…

We’re happy to have two interns this summer: Pei-Yi Wang (Google Policy Fellow) and Teresa Sempere Garcia (Community Support Intern). Pei-Yi Wang / CC BY Teresa Sempere Garcia by Christian H. Paleari / CC BY Pei-Yi has been with CC Taiwan via Academia Sinica part-time since 2006. As a graduate student at the Law School…

Books /John Liu / CC BY A report issued by the United States Government Accountability Office on June 6th confirms a trend of the educational publishing industry: textbook costs to students at higher education institutions are rising 6% per year on average, and have risen 82% over the last decade. The study, ordered by Congress,…

Judy van der Velden / CC BY-NC-ND CC is excited to announce the launch of our Affiliate Project Grants. These project grants will be used to support and expand the work of CC’s Global community of volunteers. The goal of the grant program, which is enabled by sponsorship from Google, is to increase the capacity…

Last week the Association of American Universities (AAU), Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) released a draft plan on how they’d support public access to federally funded research aligned with the February 22 White House public access directive. The SHared Access Research Ecosystem, or SHARE, is a…

Ryan / CC BY-SA Lumen Learning, a company founded to help institutions adopt open educational resources (OER) more effectively, just launched its first set of course frameworks for educators to use as-is or to adapt to their own needs. The six course frameworks cover general education topics spanning English composition, reading, writing, algebra, and college…

About 400 map makers, coders, cartographers, designers, business services providers and data mungers of chiefly spatial persuasion gathered in San Francisco to “talk OpenStreetMap, learn from each other, and move the project forward.” These conference attendees are a tip of an iceberg composed of 1.1 million registered users who have collectively gathered 3.2 billion GPS…

Scientific authoring workflow is a beast. You keep notes on paper (hopefully, a notebook, and not just loose pages), in word-processing documents unhelpfully named “notes” followed by “notes1,” “notes2” or worse, “notes_old,” “notes_old1.” You manage your bibliography on your desktop or on the web, you have a directory folder full of images, charts, photos and…

On Saturday, April 27, the Creative Commons Board of Directors met at the Safra Center at Harvard. We discussed the accomplishments of the past 12 months, both in the organization and in the broader open movement, and the new opportunities on the horizon, including creating an Advisory Council to complement the Board itself. The State…