Creative Commons

Here is my dream:

A dozen schools join forces to share curriculum created by teachers over the span of an academic year. The curriculum could range from individual lessons to more structured units. They would publish these lessons under an open license (ideally, the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike). Teachers from these dozen schools would publish these lessons on a blogging platform that allowed people to subscribe via RSS, and they would tag them according to subject and grade level.

Over the course of a year, these lessons could be aggregated into a central location. Then, over the summer, they could be organized into more structured collections that could begin to resemble textbooks. These textbooks would have soft spots and missing sections. These missing sections could then be targeted via specific outreach, and during the second year, lessons could be collected that filled these gaps. These lessons could then be aggregated into the main lesson repository, and mixed into the existing texts as needed.

Every year, for every class, teachers create original curriculum. Teachers are already doing this work. The missing piece, of course, is the sharing, which happens less frequently.

I think about this when I read about school districts selling publicly-funded curriculum to Pearson. I understand that school districts feel pinched, underfunded, and under pressure to find new revenue sources. However, the shortsightedness of selling this content to Pearson does nothing to provide a sustainable future for the district. If those texts had been released as an open resource, it would have saved countless districts an enormous amount of money.

Over the summer, we will be releasing our code for our Publishing Platform and Aggregation Hub. These tools will be freely available to all to download and use. This work has many applications; one of the ways it can be used is to aggregate, organize, and republish open content. I look forward to the day when teachers are again viewed as content experts, and purchasing a textbook from a company is viewed as an unnecessary, inefficient use of resources.

Since this site went live, we have released our blog posts under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

Recently, however, we have seen several spam sites using our content to support click-through ad sales. As part of our efforts to combat this misuse of our content, we are changing to the Non-Commercial license.

We are open to people using our content in any way they see fit; part of the reason we are open source developers is that we believe in the free and unfettered exchange of ideas. However, ad-driven spam platforms are a parasitic form of web site; we don't want any association with that type of business practice.

See our About Our Documentation page for more details.

Much discussion on the internet concerning the AP's new Pay By The Word policy. Gary Stager had this comment on Will Richardson's blog:

Why shouldn't journalists and publishers get paid for their work?

Here's a suggestion for edubloggers who believe that all intellectual property should be free - let's stop paying teachers.

I don't usually pass these things on.

Particularly in the case of videos -- but this, created by Tony Hirst, was too good not to share.

Thanks to Brian Lamb for posting about this.

From an Op-Ed in the June 1 online edition of the NY Times by Brian Greene: Put a Little Science in Your Life