Image by Flickr user Globalism Pictures (CC-BY)
I am graduating today, and along with my faculty advisors and my family, I have Creative Commons to thank.
Not long before graduation I received a friendly email reminder informing me that I still needed to submit a capstone paper to complete my Ed.S. degree in Instructional Technology & Learning Sciences. I had just moved and started a new job that was keeping me very busy. I didn’t have time to write a capstone paper from scratch, and it looked like I would need to delay my graduation.
Fortunately I have written many articles as a graduate student. Surely I could republish one of my earlier papers, couldn’t I? The answer I got from my advisors was “no” because the rights to all my published papers were now owned by publishers. All except one. I had written a report for Creative Commons while working as a consultant on their Student Journalism 2.0 project. The report was openly licensed with a CC-BY license, which meant I had permission to modify and republish it to fit the requirements of the capstone paper.
So as I celebrate my graduation here from the OpenCourseWare Consortium Global conference, I am grateful to Creative Commons who helped make it possible. This is yet another example of how being open can be useful in unexpected ways. Thanks, CC!
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I recently signed up for an online course called “Copyright for Educators.” What is truly unique about this course is that there is no official teacher. The course is being offered by P2PU (Peer-To-Peer University). The About page states that, “P2PU blurs the boundaries between students and teachers.” I’d like to think that my PhD has been a transition from student to teacher, researcher, professional, or all of the above. But why should this be limited to a PhD program? Why not allow others to join in?
Why am I taking this course?
I have worked for the OpenCourseWare Consortium for the past two years, and the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning for two years before that. I have been involved in many aspects of the OCW movement, from managing the development, testing, and localization of eduCommons (a popular OCW software platform) to creating the actual OCW courses with professors at Utah State University. As part of the process of creating OCW courses, content must be licensed in such a way that allows it to be freely available via the World Wide Web. This requires the best possible understanding of global copyright as if applies to education. I am not new to the issues of copyright in education (and have taught units on copyright in my own high school and university courses), but I feel there is still much for me to learn in this area.
While I am still working out the details of getting credit for this course in my Instructional Technology PhD program at Utah State University, I don’t think that will be a problem. I see names like Jane Park and Ahrash Bissell from ccLearn among those listed on the team and advisory group. If the folks at Creative Commons can’t facilitate an excellent course on copyright, who can? The course outline appears well-structured. I think I’m in for a treat. If any faculty from my department read this and think it sounds interesting, I would love to hear from you. BTW, I need 1 credit of independent study 
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Recently, I wrote a post called Letting your Flickr photos wander. Someone saw this post on reddit and asked me if I had a trick to detecting when people reuse my photos on Flickr. The truth is that many people are good enough to send me a note on Flickr to let me know they used my photo. I also set up a Google alert for my flickr username: caswell_tom. That way if someone gives me attribution I get an alert. Here is another case of reuse I found via a Google alert. I’m not a pro, but it’s always fun to see where my photos end up.
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I’ve been having a lot of fun with Flickr lately. I like seeing the different ways my photos get reused. From Wikipedia to Schmap.com to an online women’s magazine. Just for fun, I have added a “reused” tag to each of the photos I know has been reused somewhere. Here’s what I have so far: http://flickr.com/photos/caswell_tom/tags/reused/
This is all just anecdotal, but it seems people really started reusing my photos around the same time I changed all 1500+ of them over to an Attribution-only Creative Commons license. It could be that more and more Flickr users are enjoying the same kind of content reuse fame and glory regardless of what license they choose. But I think it has something to do with my willingness to open up my CC license by only asking for attribution without adding a bunch of other conditions that make reusers nervous. The truth is I really don’t care if people use my photos commercially. In fact, I think it’s kind of neat to see what happens with them. In a way they take on a life of their own. And you never know where they will end up.
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