Friday, July 07, 2006

Copyright issues

Jim over at Blogging Pedagogy has a post about selling course materials and comments on the fact that he has added a Creative Commons license to the blog. This is something I have been thinking about a lot lately. I can't believe that something I have written is copyrighted just because I have written it. But it is. I can't find the sites where I originally read about it, but Wikipedia has an article about it here.

Anyway, I decided to add a Creative Commons license to this blog. Not because I am worried about anyone stealing anything they find here but rather because I want to make a statement. I believe in Creative Commons licensing. I believe in sharing our thoughts and ideas and our words.

As far as I am concerned, this license doesn't change anything here on the blog. But I want to make it official.

1 comment:

Miguel Guhlin (@mGuhlin) said...

Great! When I worked at a regional education service center, I had a difficult time explaining to the business director WHY it was so important to share ideas and workshop materials for free (attribution-non-commercial-sharealike, but without all the Creative Commons since it didn't exist) with teachers via our web site.

The director wanted me to SELL to educators in the districts we served...she couldn't see that SELLING your ideas in K-12 was so AGAINST what we were, that inter-reliance of teachers in a grade level or team, sharing their ideas.

However, my vision was vindicated when workshop attendance increased, and giving stuff away for free generated MORE paid workshops on-site, and sunshine letters helped, too. She dropped the issue. This is a different culture from business, with different values.

I hope that teachers haven't lost this value, that of sharing with their colleagues, those laboring in the trenches that was so central to my teaching experience.

Your message affirms MY experience as a teacher, and I appreciate your decision to use Creative Commons.

With appreciation,
Miguel Guhlin
Around the Corner- MGuhlin.net/blog