Open licensing

Some eye-openers from the materials in the open licensing section.

On copyright:

* Copyright is meant to promote creativity - that is, by protecting works for a period, creative minds are forced to come up with their own new ideas.

* Current copyright law smells like a conspiracy theory ... (in particular the continuous extensions of the terms [especially given donations of 'the industry' to political campaigns...])

On Creative Commons:

Creative Commons does not ignore copyright, that is still with the creator.

Creative Commons does provides creators with an alternative license system where some rights can be reserved. And by stating beforehand what freedoms your give other, there is no need to ask for permission to use and remix resources, as long as the original license is respected.

On CC0 — “No Rights Reserved”**:

CC0 enables scientists, educators, artists and other creators and owners of copyright- or database-protected content to waive those interests in their works and thereby place them as completely as possible in the public domain, so that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright or database law.

In contrast to CC’s licenses that allow copyright holders to choose from a range of permissions while retaining their copyright, CC0 empowers yet another choice altogether – the choice to opt out of copyright and database protection, and the exclusive rights automatically granted to creators – the “no rights reserved” alternative to our licenses.

My thoughts:
It is a difficult issue ... !

**Creative Commons / CC BY 3.0"

Openness and badges

In my jobs I have been fortunate to be able, in fact encouraged, to keep up to date with the developments in my field. One of the ways I have been doing this is by attending the international convention of AECT. Here I run into my former professors and peers from Twente and Penn State, learn something new from time to time and try to report back when I managed to apply some theory in the real world.

In recent years the topic of openness has interested me; it makes so much sense to me. Even more when one is working in an organisation like Oxfam, where equal rights and equal access to resources is the central focus of all our work. I am developing some e-learning modules at the moment, and want them to be published under a Creative Commons license, and do run into problems with copyrights at the moment. So that will be one focus of my participation in this course.

At the last AECT convention (Jacksonville, FL, Nov 2011), I heard about Badges for the first time. And something immediately clicked for me again. So often I get questions about 'can we get accredited?' 'does this lead to a Masters?' 'what does this internal training actually mean?' And in my humble opinion the answers generally are no, no and whatever you take from it. And some people are very capable of expressing what they took from a training, how that changes the way they work, how it contributes to the organisations objectives and what it means for their value for the organisation. For this who are not so well able to voice this, badges can be an excellent additional tool to show what one is capable of.

I am going to try to design a system of badges for some of the trainings in my department in Oxfam. And participating in this course will help me gt a better idea on what it should include an how it works.

Looking forward to learning from/with others!

Cheers,
Jeroen