Gawker Media, the blog conglomerate that includes Gizmodo, Gawker, and Lifehacker among others has adopted our Attribution-NonCommercial license for all of their original content. Gizmodo’s Brylan Lam blogged about the decision here:

… I’m happy to announce that we’re being published under a Creative Commons license now. Although it’s a non-commercial license, remixes and quotes are fine by blogs commercial or otherwise, with attribution/links. But splogs can—as always—go to hell. This has always been our policy, but it’s nice to have the license right there on the bottom.

You can read more about the policy on their legal page if you’re so inclined. Congrats and thanks for contributing to the commons, Gawker Media!

When it comes to the open educational resources world, we all know that the University of Michigan is a pretty hopping place to be, what with Molly Kleinman as their copyright specialist and their Attribution-only (CC BY) licensed OER repository. Since they pop up pretty regularly in our blogosphere, I didn’t want March to pass without a shout-out to the four Health OER advocates (students) that presented at the Clinton Global Initiative University, which Open.Michigan wrote about in substantive detail last week.

The students, Nejay Ananaba and Stephanie Munz (School of Dentistry), Matt Simpson (Medical School), and Kathleen Ludewig (School of Information and Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy), are part of a Health OER team committed “to [making] comprehensive health curricula available as open educational resources (OER) to healthcare educators and students.”

The scope of the team’s strategy spans projects in several countries, including Ghana, South Africa, and Liberia. One significant component is their plan to open up the university’s first and second year medical school curriculum in their OER Repository by the year’s end. This would allow virtually any country to adapt, redistribute, and teach top notch health OER sans the copyright hassles.

Other projects include establishing the first dental school in Liberia using OER for its curriculum, and developing an OER program and institutional policies at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana. To find out more, visit Open.Michigan.

For those of you interested in knowing how Copyright Exceptions and Limitations (known as Fair Use in the US) might affect open educational resources, there will be a working session on CEL at OCWC Global 2009 in Monterrey, Mexico next month. OCWC Global 2009 is the OpenCourseWare Consortium’s first international conference of its kind. The session on International Copyright Exceptions and Limitations may include current US work exploring issues of Fair Use in OER, but is, naturally, a much larger conversation encompassing many different legal jurisdictions. From the CEL wiki,

“The realm of copyright exceptions and limitations is vast and complex. Every legal jurisdiction has its own formulation of what behaviors are exempt from copyright restrictions, and we have only begun to explore the question of how open licensing affects those formulations.”

Since we have yet to sort out which aspects of the CEL landscape ccLearn can reasonably investigate, and which partners are interested in being collaborators, we hope this working session will result in some great initial inquires into this international issue. To join a discussion of some of these topics, contribute to the wiki! You can also find out more at the OCW Blog.

At April’s CC Salon SF, we will hear from three presenters showcasing their innovative international ventures and discussing how CC licenses can be used in international projects to facilitate content sharing and connectivity across borders:

* Miquel Hudin Balsa, Co-Founder of Maneno, a blogging and communication platform built to meet the needs of the Sub-Saharan blogger and writer.

* David Harris, Executive Director of Global Lives Project, an international collaboration of filmmakers, designers, architects, activists, and institutions to chronicle 24 hours in the life of ten individuals from around the globe, forming an innovative video installation and collaborative online video encyclopedia.

* Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, Founder and Director of Global Oneness Project, which seeks to explore how the radically simple notion of interconnectedness can be lived in our increasingly complex world by creating a “living library” of films chronicling the courageous lives of people passionate about sustainability, conflict resolution, spirituality, art, economics, indigenous culture, and social justice.

We’re delighted to have our friends over at PariSoMa host us for the second time in their lovely and inviting space (map and directions). Plenty of street parking is available. Please note, the space is located up two steep flights of stairs, and unfortunately does not currently have elevator access.

Light refreshments will be provided, and since we rely on the generosity of our community to keep us afloat, we’ll be accepting donations for CC at the door.

Check out the event posting on Upcoming and Facebook. We hope to see you there!

CC Salons are global events, and anyone can start one, no matter where you live. We encourage you to check out our resources for starting your own salon in your area.

ccLearn is collaborating with the Peer 2 Peer University and Mozilla to teach practical open education skills to educators and anyone else who is interested. From the announcement on the course wiki:

“This six week course is targeted at educators who will gain basic skills in open licensing, open technology, and open pedagogy; work on prototypes of innovative open education projects; and get input from some of the world leading innovators along the way.

The course will kick-off with a web-seminar on Thursday 2 April 2009 and run for 6 weeks.

Weekly web seminars introduce new topics ranging from content licensing to the latest open technologies and peer assessment practices. Participants will share project ideas with a community of peers, work on individual projects, and get feedback from experienced mentors. We will also take a close look at some of the most innovative examples of open education projects, and speak to the people who designed them, including:

The Open Source Software courses at Seneca College;

David Wiley’s Introduction to Open Education;

The open blog infrastructure at Mary Washington University; etc.

The course is targeted at educators who want to help shape the open education future. Participants should have some knowledge of web technologies, or open content licensing, or open pedagogy (or all three), but don’t need to be experts.

Interested in participating? Head over to the course wiki, and submit your project idea!

Course outline: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Education/EduCourse

Sign-up page: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Education/EduCourse/SignUp

For questions about the course or the sign-up process, contact:

Philipp Schmidt
Peer 2 Peer University
philipp AT peer2peeruniversity.org”

Spaces will fill up fast, but that doesn’t prevent non-registered learners from having open and complete access to the course as it plays out. And since all Mozilla Education materials are available for reuse, redistribution, and remixing under CC BY, nothing stops users from creating a mirror wiki and developing their own projects!

Over on the Science Commons blog, Thinh writes:

The NIH Public Access Policy, which was due to expire this year, has now been made permanent by the 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act, signed into law last week.

Last year, Science Commons, SPARC, and ARL jointly released a White Paper authored by our board member Mike Carroll called “Complying With the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy,” explaining the new NIH-mandated PubMed deposit requirement and questions that grant recipients should consider in designing a program to comply with it. At that time, the new mandatory policy had just taken effect, and many recipients were still learning how to comply. Nevertheless, the results were dramatic. Prior to NIH’s mandatory deposit requirement, under a voluntary policy NIH began in 2005, the compliance rate in terms of deposits in PubMed had been very low (4%, as published in an NIH report to Congress in 2006). Shortly after the adoption of the new mandatory policy, submissions spiked to an all time high, prompting an NIH official to project compliance rates of 55-60%. Just take a look at this NIH chart, and note the sharp rise after the policy took effect in early 2008.

In a subsequent White Paper that Science Commons and SPARC jointly issued, our recommendations included looking beyond compliance with the new policy and taking this opportunity to develop comprehensive institutional deposit and public access policies, such as Harvard’s open access policy.

Making the NIH Public Access Policy permanent will provide scholars and institutions with much needed certainty and impetus to focus on implementing these requirements within their institutions. It also creates a opportunity for scholars, universities, and the research community to take a broader look at their institution’s scholarly publishing and open access policies, not only as it applies to deposit in PubMed, but also as it applies to their own institutional repositories and scholarly communities.

We will work with our collaborators to develop further policy and legal briefings for university and public research institutions who are studying these issues. Look for that this summer.

In this age of information overload, traditional teaching methods and roles are fast becoming extinct. Students have access to most of the relevant information in their teachers’ heads and more, but this doesn’t mean students know how to organize and interpret this information in a meaningful way.

George Siemens and Peter Tittenberger have developed a handbook for educators who want to use technologies to aid (both teachers and learners) in the learning process. The Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning explores “[how education is] to fulfill its societal role of clarifying confusion when tools of control over information creation and dissemination rest in the hands of learners…” The issue is “information abundance” and the handbook is designed to be a resource for educators who want to face these issues head-on.

The handbook is available as a wiki and PDF, and is licensed CC BY-NC.

This coming weekend (March 21-22) in Cambridge, Massachusetts the Free Software Foundation is holding its annual meeting, dubbed the Libre Planet Conference. Many of CC’s best friends and supporters will be there, as will CC staff Asheesh Laroia and I. If you aren’t familiar with the significance of the free software movement to free culture, start by checking out the links on our post celebrating the former’s 25th birthday, or better yet come to Libre Planet. The conference will feature the hottest issues in software freedom, some of which include a free culture component.

Another important conference is coming to the eastern part of North America — the Libre Graphics Meeting, May 6-9 in Montreal. Developers of the most important free software graphics applications will be represented. These applications are heavily used by contributors to free culture sites such as Wikimedia Commons and many of the developers engage in cutting edge free cultural productions themselves, e.g., Blender. CC staff have attended in years past and Jon Phillips is helping put together this one.

Today marks the beginning of the second half of the month, and with it, the Ides of March are safely behind us. What else is behind us: the beta launches of several Flexbooks, aka the CK-12 Foundation‘s version of open source textbooks.

The most notable Flexbook is the one we mentioned last fall—notable because of its integral tie to state standards via a partnership with the Commonwealth of Virginia. The textbook now has a title, 21st Century Physics FlexBook: A Compilation of Contemporary and Emerging Technologies. According to Government Computer News, the effort was statewide, “a collaborative effort by the state departments of Technology and Education and volunteer educators, engineers and scientists using Web-based tools to quickly up-date educational resources” to “provide students with timely information about nanoscience, dark matter, quarks and leptons.” This only makes sense as Physics (and science in general) is a rapidly changing field that the traditional textbook review process cannot keep up with. Open textbooks, on the other hand, are instantly editable and constantly changing; you could even say that they are perpetually in beta.

Don’t hesitate to check it out, along with the myriad other Flexbooks up for review. All Flexbooks are licensed CC BY-SA.

What’s ahead of CK-12: the progression of existing Flexbooks and the partnerships they have with other states, where some are working on companion teacher editions.

Also, spring!

Thank you to all the internship applicants. It’s past the March 13 deadline, and we have more than enough submissions to review. We will not be able to interview all applicants. We will announce our final decisions by the end of this month or early April. Applicants may email inquiries to me, Jennifer Yip. (No phone calls, please.)