July 14 the Australian Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy released Australia’s Digital Economy: Future Directions under a CC BY-NC-ND licence. Many readers of this blog will be especially interested in the report’s section on open access to public sector information: An open access approach to the release of public sector information is…
As part of UNESCO’s World Conference on Higher Education, UNESCO hosted a session and panel discussion on open educational resources (OER). The topic of the conference was “The New Dynamics of Higher Education and Research for Societal Change and Development,” and OER was considered an important dynamic in higher education. The conference took place over…
President Obama announced yesterday the American Graduation Initiative, a twelve billion dollar plan to reform U.S. community colleges. The initiative calls for five million additional community college graduates by 2020, and plans that “increase the effectiveness and impact of community colleges, raise graduation rates, modernize facilities, and create new online learning opportunities” to aid this…
Caught an interesting NY Times post over the weekend about Riversimple, a British start-up that recently debuted a prototype of a two-seat hydrogen fuel cell car. There are several interesting things about Riversimple’s proposed business model – for instance, it plans to lease the car instead of sell it, and wants to employ a manufacturing…
Robot by genewolf CC BY-ND 2.0 After last week’s exciting announcement that Google Image search is now capable of filtering results by usage rights, we realized there is a lot of interest in how creators can signal their work as being CC-licensed to both humans and robots. Fortunately, CC has a solution for this that…
CC Vietnam has released its first license draft (pdf) and is inviting the Vietnamese and international community to join in reviewing it. The goal of the license porting, coordinated by Creative Commons International, is to legally and linguistically adapt the CC licensing suite to national law. That way, creators enjoy additional legal certainty while better…
vosotros presents: the years is the latest release from CC-friendly label Vosotros. Described as a “a musical journey through time”, the CC BY-NC-SA licensed album is being released as a free download through out the month of July while simultaneously being sold through a variety of digital outlets. The album, which is a collaboration between…
In case you missed it, last Friday UNESCO published “Open Educational Resources: Conversations in Cyberspace”, three years worth of documentation surrounding the UNESCO OER Community. From their announcement, “Since 2005, UNESCO has been at the forefront of building awareness about this movement by facilitating an extended conversation in cyberspace. A large and diverse international community…
Last week, in Amsterdam, approximately 70 people from around the world gathered in one big room to discuss the current state of affairs in open translation. We discussed open-source translation software, open and volunteer translation communities, openly licensed works – both translated and for translating, open databases for machine translation, and the intersection of translation…
Over at Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow points readers to Snitchtown: The Photo Essay, a wonderful adaptation of his essay, Snitchtown. Originally a CC BY-NC-SA licensed editorial on “the future of urban surveillance” – specifically the ubiquity of CCTV cameras found in the the UK – the new work, authored by Emma Byrne, is a photo…