Open Access News points out that the Open Archives Initiative is seeking public comment on their specification for conveying copyright metadata on Open Access content. Such a specification is critical to the aforementioned goal of assembling course packs out of Open Access materials. (more…)
Tag: Creative-Commons
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Furl Follow-up: Mike Giles Responds
As a follow-up to my earlier post, I’m happy to report that I’ve had a satisfying email exchange with Furl’s Mike Giles. On the PDF front, Furl is planning to index both .pdf and .doc files in the “near future.” (No, he didn’t give me a timeline.)
Even more interesting is the possibility regarding Creative Commons. Currently, Furl only makes cached copies available to the account holder for personal use; you can only share the original URLs. But Mike is open to the possibility of working with CreativeCommons.org to allow Furlers to share content that has the appropriate machine-readable CC metadata. (Of course, he couldn’t make me any promises at this point.)
This is potentially a huge step forward. I believe that Furl could provide a major boost to CC license usage on the web (and vice versa). If this is a feature that would make you more likely to use Furl, then I encourage you to contact Mike with your use case.
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Furl, PDF's, and Creative Commons
I have started to use Furl to create an archive of articles (mostly PDFs) that I find on the web related to informational cascades for myself (and eventually for my blog readers as well). So far I’m finding two significant limitations.
First, Furl apparently doesn’t do full text search for PDF’s yet. That’s too bad; there are OSS libraries available that would allow them to index these documents. Maybe they’ll get around to it.
More worrisome, though, is the IP problem that can’t be fixed by simply adding a standard feature. If I Furl somebody’s PDF and then share the link to the archive (Furl copies and saves web content), am I violating copyright? I’m not sure when or if that happens. It would be great if Furl the ability to read Creative Commons metadata and guide users on any potential Furling-related IP issues.
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A Thousand and One Affordances: iTunes, KM, and Creative Commons
For several reasons, I have been resisting the temptation to post about Duke’s now-famous decision to give an iPod to every first-year student. To begin with, it’s been covered to death, so I didn’t think that just posting the link was doing a particular service to anyone. Second, others have already written about at least some of the affordances of the iPod that make it a potentially good fit. And third, since I just bought a new one myself, my iPod envy is under control.
But it occurs to me that there is a possible implication that hasn’t been fully explored yet, having to do with the affordances not just of the iPod but of the iTunes Music Store (ITMS). If you think about it, the iPod/iTunes/ITMS system that Apple created is simply an efficient means for distributing any digital content with any well-defined DRM restrictions. ITMS even has its own system for categorizing information (though anybody who has seriously tried to search ITMS by genre knows that their taxonomy has some significant limitations). You could use it to deliver journal articles or learning objects just as easily as songs (as Duke clearly intends to do). You could distribute some content for free and other content for fee (as Duke also clearly intends to do). You could probably even create a channel that passes Creative Commons licensing information and, in some cases, even inforces it. For example, some of the DRM options on PDFs and even Word 2003 documents (e.g., allow copying but not editing, allow or don’t allow cut-and-paste) mirror some CC licensing options. If you hook it into something like Merlot or MLX you could develop a relatively efficient learning object distribution channel, where teachers could post playlists that function something like an enhanced version of Instructional Architect (enhanced because it affords downloading of learning objects for offline use and potentially enforces DRM).
I’m not ready to suggest that this is the way to go; it may be that a P2P model like LionShare is a better option in the long-run. But it’s worth thinking about.
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Creative Commons and Learning Objects
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.