# OpenEd: Week 7


A friend is coming to visit me this week, so I will finish next week’s
reading and assignment in advance, to have more free time.

*QUESTIONS: Can you think of license options that CC is currently
missing that would benefit the open education movement? As the CC and
GFDL licenses are incompatible, how can OCW content be legally remixed
with Wikipedia content? Some people claim that the Creative Commons
ShareAlike clause provides most of the protections people want to secure
from the Creative Commons NonCommercial clause. What do you think these
people mean, are they right, and why? Is copyleft good for the open
education movement? Why or why not?*

![](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/69/173265775_a518f65581_m.jpg)

**Discussion of readings**

In continuing our discussion from last week, this week looks more at
specific licenses and their application to open education. I
particularly appreciated [WikiEducator: Memoirs, myths,
misrepresentations and the
magic](http://blog.worldcampus.psu.edu/index.php/2007/04/04/wikieducator/ "http://blog.worldcampus.psu.edu/index.php/2007/04/04/wikieducator/"),
with the wealth of comments below. This also made me think about the
problem with using RSS readers - although Google Reader is magical in
allowing me to keep up to date with hundreds of different sources,
easily share interesting postings with my friends etc, it hides the
comments - and I fear that when reading the postings of my classmates in
the Open Ed course for example, I miss out on part of the richness,
unless I open each posting individually to read the comments. I also
enjoyed the reading [The Illogical Rhetoric of
Share-Alike](http://learnonline.wordpress.com/2007/05/04/the-illogical-rhetoric-of-share-alike/),
which was linked to from one of the readings. (It’s interesting how blog
posts are so much more a part of the “conversation” - when reading the
huge tomes from UNESCO and OLCOS and the like, they stand alone as
monoliths. Perhaps they cite other research findings and reports, but
only occasionally am I so interested that I will go look them up. When
reading blog posts though, there are a million jump-off points, and
![](http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1259/769925499_8327bb1cd9_m.jpg)I
find myself tumbling through a many-faceted conversation, going far
beyond our original “curriculum”. Indeed, the discourse and activity
around OER is so broad, that I am still struggling to define my own
“level of engagement” and very I fit in, where I can make a meaningful
contribution - as a current undergraduate student, as a (hopefully)
soon-to-be graduate student, as a teacher (formal and informal),
learner, participant, activist, creator…

I have always been sceptical of the CC NC (non-commercial) license, as I
also mentioned in the previous posting, but this week’s readings made me
more skeptical towards the CC SA (share-alike) requirement as well. I
mainly focused on the problem of license incompatibility, but in “The
Illogical Rhetoric of Share-Alike” we are also introduced to the
problems of universities and institutions of higher learning in
considering to share major parts of their material with the world. Their
main issue is not what other people might want to do with it, but that
they themselves might be restricted from freely using the “improved”
materials as they see fit - the example being designing a training
program for a corporate client, incorporating material that they already
had developed, or working with indigenous communities and incorporating
material that they would not feel comfortable sharing. These are
interesting issues, however I wonder if some of them might not be
resolved by thinking that applying a Creative Commons license does not,
as far as I understand, obligate you to distribute the material. So if a
university was working with an indigenous community, using CC SA
licensed material and material from the community, they would have to
license all the material as CC SA, but if they only distributed it to
the community in paper format, or on a closed learning site, nobody else
would have access - whether it is CC licensed or not. I do realize the
problem though, and I appreciate the people raising it.

**![](http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1090/770790872_f3a06c0513_m.jpg)The
need for another CC?**

As stated earlier, I believe that there should be a CC license that did
not require attribution. That does not mean that you are not allowed to
provide attribution, and indeed you probably would in normal use in
academia - because that is how we do things. However, you would have the
option of not providing attribution when that is problematic because of
the medium. As far as I understand, the reason to use CC NC is not
primarily to prevent people from making money off material, but rather
to avoid that open material is “re-appropriated” by commercial entities.
In this case, I believe SA does provide sufficient “protection” by
making sure that all “value added” is returned to the community. There
are many cases in which entrepreneurs and commercial entities can be
very important both in adding value (as has been the case with open
source!) and crucially in distributing the content.

Stian\
 *(thank you to [Fanch the System @
flickr](http://flickr.com/photos/manannan_alias_fanch/) for the great
photos)*