Creative Commons Feed

Or for short, LRMI tech WG CFP.

Read on for some exciting details about the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative, which we announced last month in collaboration with the Association of Educational Publishers.

The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) to create a common metadata vocabulary for describing learning resources is seeking the participation of education metadata experts to participate in a technical Working Group over the next 6-12 months.

Spurred by the growing need to make online learning resources more discoverable and the opportunity created by the launch of schema.org (a Bing/Google/Yahoo! project to develop and encourage use of metadata vocabularies which can be used to enhance search results), LRMI has been formed. Its goals, in brief:

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By now, you’ve heard and/or used the term OER (Open Educational Resources) a ton of times. Whether you’re an advocate for open education, promoting the use, reuse, and adaptation of openly licensed educational materials, or an everyday user of them because you find them convenient and effective for your teaching or learning needs, you have contributed in some way to improving the educational landscape for everyone, everywhere.

The Associated Press wants to track reuse of their content through a “news registry.” This registry “will employ a microformat for news developed by AP”:

The microformat will essentially encapsulate AP and member content in an informational “wrapper” that includes a digital permissions framework that lets publishers specify how their content is to be used online and which also supplies the critical information needed to track and monitor its usage.

Through its Copyrightⁱ Advisory Group, the Australian Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA) has published a Creative Commons information pack online, a bundle of eight documents that distills the basics of CCⁱ licensing and the philosophy behind it. This pack is a great resource for educators and students, and we encourage you to use it in your schools by adapting it however you like.

The info pack includes concise and concrete answers to simple questions, like:

The open educational resources movement has been picking up steam lately, even attracting the attention of legislators. What’s hot in the new Persian year (aka the start of spring) is the recently introduced “OER Bill“. What’s that, you say?

Well in its own words, it’s a bill “To require Federal agencies to collaborate in the development of freely-available open source educational materials in college-level physics, chemistry, and math, and for other purposes.”

Once again the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase has selected great creative works to include in the latest version of Ubuntu, this version due out in April. As with the previous Show Case, all of the winning entries will be bundled with the Ubuntu release and licensed under a Creative Commonsⁱ Attribution-ShareAlike license. This time, however, there were three categories, so three winners. The categories are: Audio, Video, and Image.

The potential migration of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects to using CC BY-SA as their primary content license has spurred some interesting discussions about attribution — how to give credit for a massively collaborative work in a variety of mediums? This question is relevant regardless of migration, but clearly migration has prompted the discussion and provides an opportunity to progress best practices.