Creative Commons and Content

Tonight I think I hit a tipping point: I decided I'd rather watch a TED talk online than channel surf after class... that's a huge content choice that indicates, for the first time, that television and streaming video are equal choices in my world. *applause for the 21st century girl*

And this is what I watched:


I am going to recommend this to everyone when I start giving Creative Commons workshops (already have one group of librarians interested, woot woot!). It's too long to share during a session since we usually have such a short time together, but it will be good "homework."

What struck me as I watched it was the connection between the message we send to students and the standards we then hold them to... lots of educators (and I include myself here) say to students "oh, we can use (this video, this article, this picture, this music) and it doesn't matter, we're not making any money, it's for SCHOOL." And I'm afraid all they're hearing is the sound of the teacher in Charlie Brown (wah wuh wah wuuuh wanh) and "it doesn't matter." The rogue librarians or teachers who emphasize the importance of copyright are treated as pariahs who are just totally out of touch.

Then when it comes time to create a works cited page for their term papers, we wonder how they became such flagrant plagiarists. Oh, the morality!!!

Creative Commons gives us a wonderful parallel road to travel and an awesome model to emulate. The most common license I see used is the "non-commercial/attribution" which, in a sense, is the one we have been presuming exists in our classrooms and libraries all along. And what a wonderful thing for students to hear over and over: "We're not making any money here, and we just need to give credit where credit's due."

Now that's a term paper I can't wait to read ;)