I just added a Creative Commons license to e-Literate. While I have always been supportive of open content, I didn’t really get how immediately important it is for higher education until I started helping my significant other start searching for ESL teaching resources on the Maricopa Learning Exchange (MLX). For those who don’t know, MLX is a Learning Object Repository–a place where teachers can share content that they have created and/or discovered that is useful for teaching.
One of the objects that we found was a small site that a professor had created which linked to a whole bunch of external resources. Great. The trouble is that Kathy (my significant other) is teaching a non-online class and, since it’s her first semester at the urban community college where she is about to start work, she doesn’t know what computer access is like for her students. So she has to print out the resources that she finds. Unfortunately, many of the great resources linked from the web site have no published copyright policy (although many of them have copyright notices). So in order to (ethically and legally) use the content, she has to email each web site owner and ask permission. Needless to say, this could turn out to be an arduous task.
That’s why I have added the “Creative Commons License” badge on the sidebar, which links to a simple explanation of what rights I grant for content re-use. This will apply to all content on this site, including the longer articles that I intend to eventually write and include here.
