Maer's EduTech Blog: Creative Commons

Learning about Creative Commons in depth recently has been very illuminating. While I was familiar with CC, especially with respect to licensing of freely-released music, I wasn't aware that the organization (and the licensing system) had spawned such a rich and massive cache of content. Here's a random beautiful picture I found through WikiMedia Commons.

Photo Attribution:
Original image: "Colibri Thalassinus"
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/Colibri-thalassinus-001.jpg
by: Mdf
Released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License

It is easy to imagine how teaching students about Creative Commons as a licensing system, but also as an interconnected community of content creators and users, would be relevant and useful. Comparing the Creative Commons "copyleft" model with the copyright model that reserves all rights to content creators, students can critically evaluate digital media content for their own use.

A simple demonstration for students might include showing them an image of a p

opular Disney cartoon character and asking them to opine on how they might be able to use that image in a way that is legal and respects the copyright holder's rights. Although the Fair Use doctrine adds a level of complexity (perhaps you'd introduce this nuance to Middle School age students and older), students will quickly see that they are quite restricted in its use. The next discussion would show an image of a cartoon character licensed under CC, which would lead the students to the conclusion that t

hey have far more latitude.

Next, show them the guidelines for attribution (for both copyright and copyleft works), and you have a stand-alone lesson in digital citizenship and media literacy.

Finally, I used Flickr to upload a picture to try out their CC licensing options. By default when you upload to Flickr, the license is set to a standard copyright (all rights reserved). I changed the licensing scheme to CC-Attrib-Noncommercial-NoDerivs. I took the photo while repairing my iMac a few weeks ago.