Remember the California Free Digital Textbooks Initiative and how it resulted in 16 open textbooks, 10 of which met 90% of California’s standards? Well, since these textbooks were licensed under one of the Creative Commons licenses that allows derivation (the licenses sans the ND term), they can not only be translated into various languages, but…

RamSitaGods, Nina Paley | CC BY-SA Last week, The Wall Street Journal posted a fascinating article on the profits made by Nina Paley for her film Sita Sings The Blues. Widely available for free online under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, Sita has garnered $55,000 to date, an impressive amount for a film that…

Deproduction, a Denver-based video production company, and Civic Pixel, an open-source web development group, have joined forces to become the Open Media Foundation. The two groups were previously affiliated through Denver Open Media where they taught local communities media production tools, producing unique and engaging content in the process. The Open Media Foundation picks up…

This Monday, we began a guest curation series at our Free Music Archive portal. Rather than attempt to distill the vast landscape of CC-licensed music on our own, we thought it better to reach out to those on the ground working to support and expose these type of artists in their given communities. What better…

Earlier this year, CC Learn launched CC Learn Productions, highlighting reports and three document series: CC Learn Recommendations, CC Learn Explanations, and CC Learn Step by Step Guides. Since April, we have greatly expanded our repertoire to about a dozen documents, touching on basic topics such as Why CC BY? to legally incompatible content in…

Last week To Shoot An Elephant, a CC Attribution-Share Alike CC Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike licensed documentary on life in the Gaza Strip, won the award for “Most Innovative Filmmaker” at Florence’s Festival dei Popoli. From the voting committee: “After we watched this film we engaged in a long passionate discussion. This film never left us. We…

In case you haven’t heard, WikiEducator‘s Wayne Mackintosh announced earlier this week that they were joining forces with Connexions “to provide educators with greater freedom of choice to mix and match the best of two OER worlds, namely “producer-consumer” models with more traditional work flow approaches and commons-based peer production.” WikiEducator and Connexions are two…

Esther Wojcicki, Chair of the Creative Commons board of directors, has insightful comments on a recent New York Times story on teachers selling lessons online. Esther’s column in the Huffington Post closes with: While it is an interesting alternative for teachers to have the option of selling their lesson plans, realistically the culture of teachers…

Photo by Mr. Mayo CC BY-NC A few weeks ago, I had the chance to talk to George Mayo, known as Mr. Mayo to his students, a middle school Language Arts teacher in Maryland. Mr. Mayo was brought to CC Learn’s attention by Lawrence Lessig, CC’s founder and current board member, who Skyped with Mr.…

Indaba Music just launched a fantastic new clip library of over 8,000 CC Attribution licensed sounds and loops. Already one of the premier destination for musicians to collaborate online, their new clip library adds to Indaba’s appeal by offering an easy and legal way for musicians to add sounds and loops to their work. To…