I’m excited to be speaking tomorrow with the young journalists at the National High School Journalism Convention. A few months ago, Creative Commons had a table at a similar convention in San Francisco. When we saw the enthusiasm that the students there had about open licensing, we decided to start planning a session about Creative…

Opensourceway / CC BY-SA United States Senators Dick Durbin of Illinois and Al Franken of Minnesota have introduced legislation called the Affordable College Textbook Act that seeks to make college textbooks affordable and openly available under the Creative Commons Attribution license. According to Durbin’s press release, Bill S.1704 does 5 things: Creates a grant program…

A few weeks ago, CC co-hosted an open education meetup in London with P2PU, the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN), and FLOSS Manuals Foundation. We also led or participated in sessions and tracks on open science, makes for cultural archives, collaborations across the open space, and open education data at the Mozilla Festival immediately following the…

Aurélie Filippetti / Open Knowledge Foundation / CC BY French minister of culture and communications Aurélie Filippetti launched a set of initiatives yesterday designed to promote a more creative, more open France. The impressive announcement covers a lot of measures, including an open data policy for cultural data, the launch of a new workspace designed…

This is a guest post written by Gino Cingolani, a member on the design team for the CC Toolkit project. We’re making progress with the project, and wanted to share about a regional activity that helped launch the development of the CC Toolkits. Thanks to Gino, Teresa Sempere Garcia, and Pablo Corbalan for leading the…

This is a guest post by Pete Forsyth, organizer of the School of Open’s “Writing Wikipedia Articles: The Basics & Beyond” course and member of WikiProject Open. The University of Mississippi’s Spring 2014 course “Open Educational Resources and Practices” will include the module “Writing Wikipedia Articles” (aka WIKISOO), which I developed and taught through the…

Providing free learning with pathways to formal credit, the OERu officially launched on Friday November 1, 2013 at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops British Columbia. “In basing your learning and teaching on OER, you have an excellent opportunity to treat the minds of your students primarily as fires to be set alight rather than as…

Finally the Arabic translation… / Muhammad Basheer / CC BY Following a multi-year process and the dedication of several Creative Commons Arab regional teams and communities, Creative Commons is very proud to announce that its 3.0 license suite is now available in Arabic. The Egypt 3.0 licenses were completed by our CC Egypt team, hosted…

Kansas City Postal Band / Unidentified photographer(courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution) / Public Domain Our friends at SoundCloud just told us about a contest they’re running with the Smithsonian Institution. The Smithsonian publishes audio from its archives on SoundCloud under CC BY-NC. Now, it wants to show off all the possibilities for remixing open content…

It’s been a long time since we last wrote about the ongoing discussion of the NonCommercial and NoDerivatives licenses. Recall that last year CC heard suggestions that it should stop offering NC and ND licenses in future versions of our license suite because these licenses do not create a true commons of open content that…