The Village Green

2311 – Collaboration Rules! Discover Creative Commons – Cindy Loehr – 6/20/07

Cindy is an integration specialist in Cherry Creek and works with 6 schools.  I work with 38.  Creative Commons is changing copyright in the world today.  Great place to search for pictures, music for podcasting, videos, and more.  Cindy used Route 66 as an analogy.  We moved to a wall to show our comfort level with the subject.  Those new were in LA, those experts were in Chicago.  Most of us were somewhere in between.

As educators, we use digital media all the time: podcasts, blogs, image slide shows, etc.  Lawrence Lessig is instrumental in the development of Creative Comments.  http://lessig.org/freeculture/free.html In essence, creative commons allows for protecting your work but making it public for others to freely use.  We viewed the presentation from OSCON 2004 on Lessig’s site.  Some of the session was slowed down due to attendees’ lack of computer knowledge.

Cindy does not argue for the elimination of copyright, rather the use of alternatives.  Trading cards were distributed listing different issues and Colorado IL standards.  The cards were created using fd’s Flickr toys - http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/

Creative commons, http://creativecommons.org/ , allows for sharing, reusing, and remixing.  Next we watched a video “Wanna Work Together?” that demonstrates the uses of CC.  Essentially, CC allows you to stamp your work with specific copyright information that specifies what others can do with your material.  http://creativecommons.org/about/history covers the history of CC.  There are many options for copyright under CC, some limiting commercial use, some restricting modifications, some just saying use it anyway you want.

http://search.creativecommons.org is used for searching.  The Google tab has a lot of documents. Google and Yahoo are fairly new.  Cindy mostly uses the image and audio sections.  The searches in flickr only include those results with CC licensing information.  You can also search from flickr by http://flickr.com/creativecommons and the results show the CC licenses.

Cindy talked about brainstorming before searching. The example she used was the term avalanche.  When looking at flickr results, she also looked at tags.  Picsearch.com says they are family friendly.  Pics4learning is another one.  http://zoo-n.com/flickr-storm/ creates trays for flickr slide shows.  Think digital story telling.  Bighugelabs is another one, linked above.

For music, CC uses Owl Music.  Searching on Owl uses sound, not text. http://www.owlmm.com/ searches by selecting a sound file, and it looks for similar works.  You can choose whether or not to use commercial music.  This is totally cool!  Also, http://www.jamendo.com for more music.  Also, CCMixter, http://ccmixter.com/