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Posts Tagged ‘Creative Commons’

Creative Commons Salon NYC

The first ever Creative Commons Salon with a focus on “opening education” took place last night in a spacious penthouse suite atop an office building in Soho. Three presentations, each running about one-hour, demonstrated a few ways that teachers are leveraging the power of CC licenses to make education more accessible to both students and the public at large.

Eric Frank began the night with a detailed explanation about his mission to make online text books for university students free and affordable. Frank co-founded the company Flat World Knowledge which claims to offer “online books by leading experts, peer-reviewed and free.” He pointedly addressed the problem as one that reaches beyond the frugal student:

The textbook industry is supporting a disruptive business model in which the burden is not only put on students, but is just as equally felt by teachers. In order to turn a profit the publishers push out new editions of text books – almost annually. This forces teachers to restructure their lesson plans.

Flat World Knowledge offers their books under a freemium model: the online copy is free for everyone, a printed copy runs about $40 (and all the content is distributed under a CC license). The concept was loudly applauded by the audience, but during the Q&A there were many questions regarding the credibility of the authors and the quality of the peer-review.

One key element missing from the Flat World Knowledge library is that they will never be able to share books that are already under copyright (which is about 99% of all texts). And it’s here that Google Book Search – which brazenly vows “to organize all the [books in the worlds'] information and make it universally accessible and useful” – could potentially cut deep into the future of online textbooks. With only 20 text books available at the moment, Flat World Knowledge has an ambitious road ahead of them. But perhaps by focusing on one field (whether it’s economics, foreign languages or history) they would be able to focus and lead that particular segment.

Later in the evening Neeru Paharia presented her work in developing the free online university: Peer 2 Peer University. More info about P2PU is available at the site: http://p2pu.org/

Paharia was followed by a panel of K-12 technologists/educators: David Bill and Arvind Grover – who also happen to be organizers for this weekend’s TEDxNYED event – and Kerri Richardson Redding, Director of Academic Technology at the Brooklyn Friends School. One of the most fascinating parts of this conversation was the stories from the classroom. Grover explained,

Our kids were REALLY confused about citations. They don’t really know the difference between Google and the places that Google takes you. This girl had done a wonderful job on this poetry project, and at the end of this long paper she had one citation: ‘Google.com’.

Grover teaches lessons about Creative Commons and copyright in the classroom precisely because in a multi-modal, remix society, knowing how to propery attribute a creative work to it’s original author is essential with how we communicate and share ideas. Grover continued with a anecdote about when his students were asked to be the creators,

When my students began the project they’d say things like, “I want to be paid for my work”, and “We’re going to make a million dollars!” So in this situation, as the creator, they’re quick to opt for traditional copyright.

He introduced one example of a girl who took a picture of a lock (see photo) and continued, “but then we debated whether someone will really pay money… for THIS! (referring to the picture of the lock). In his classroom he didn’t force his students to adopt a Creative Commons license, but eventually he found that his students would rather share their work and be part of something. “The biggest thing for students is being part of something”, concluded Grover, “And they – more so than their parents – came to understand that there is value in sharing content under a Creative Commons license.”

Creative Commons Case Studies

Building An Australasian CommonsAlmost a year ago Creative Commons launched the Case Studies Project with the aim of qualitatively measuring the impact of CC licenses on the world. The project lives on the CC wiki and everyone is invited to contribute by adding “interesting, innovative, or noteworthy uses of Creative Commons.” As of this writing, the project showcases around 500 Case Studies of people using a CC License for photography, music, film, literature and education.

Unfortunately, the CC wiki (IMHO) is slightly awkward to navigate: you can browse through the case studies, but since most of us aren’t looking for a specific case study it is difficult to get an overall impression. Luckily, Creative Commons Australia recently completed a book entitled Building an Australasian Commons that highlights sixty-five of the case studies (a pre-print PDF version of the book is now available online). Building an Australasian Commons is an amazing first step for aggregating this information and presenting it in an easily digestible and persuasive manner. The 195 page PDF lifts the project from the website, and with the magic of good design techniques, reworks it into something that tells a larger story – and something that is fashionable enough to put on your coffee table.

How To Improve the Case Studies
In order to spread CC beyond the walls of the free-culture movement and into mainstream society CC needs more evidence that demonstrates whether it has been successful for artists. So in addition to the book, what other ways can the case studies be presented such that they have the power to influence the general public?

Is there additional data that we could be collecting from the CC licensed artists?

The first thing that comes to mind is that the case studies need to include more hard data about artists’ income and listenership. Among the participants in the music study, a few of the more generous participants have disclosed the following:

  • Nine Inch Nails provided some of the most detailed information on their pricing model and revealed that they took in 1.6million in the first week from sales on their website.
  • Musician Jonathan Coulton was “unable to give statistics” but did say that 45% of his income in 2007 was from paid digital downloads.
  • Jamendo, the online music platform promoting CC-licensed music, has made all of the site’s donation statistics publicly available. Economist Aaron Schiff tabulated the data and published his findings that, “Over the 22 months there were 1,454 donations made, for a total value of US$21,150. So each artist is receiving very little money, if anything.”

While these numbers are interesting, they aren’t enough to conclude anything about the Creative Commons licenses as a whole. For instance, there isn’t a constant metrics that I can rely on to make comparisons between the musicians. And further, how can I relate these results to musicians that aren’t using a CC license?

As a parallel think about how Billboard Magazine has been reporting on album sales and popularity for the past 60 years. Their rankings are publicly available and provide the industry with a standard for measurement. What standards of measurement can we use in the CC case studies?

I’d also like to learn if there are people who feel that their work has been hindered by the use of a CC license. What went wrong? What can we learn from this? Considering that the only “negative” conclusion was drawn from one of the few participants that had disclosed the largest amount of hard-data (Jamendo’s finding that “each artist is receiving very little money”), there hasn’t been enough research into the true consequences of using a CC license.

If CC could collect more data about each musician then perhaps the “musicians, music professionals and record execs” (Billboard’s audience) would pay more attention. And more importantly, Creative Commons would gain the ‘stickiness’ necessary to penetrate mainstream culture.

Read the Original Post on musicNeutral

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