Is the Creative Commons License Valuable for Academic Work?

The Varieties of Academic Production or What would William James Have Done Given the Opportunity?

Many different kinds of work go on in Universities. Scholarly work may or may not result in publication, and the type and purpose of the work differs by discipline. Some researchers may be interested in sharing pedagogical work that takes the form of syllabi, assignments, or teaching approaches. Poster or panel presentations contain the seeds that lead to work that is intended for publication and a scholar may choose to share such work to gather feedback or critique without compromising future publication opportunities. Some genres of work are more likely to be self-published than released through commercial or other third-party publishers. For instance, in the academic world, musical compositions, videos, musical recordings, and works of design might fall into this category. Each of these creation types might be more comfortably released into the public sphere with a CC license. Whether a CC license is appropriate for some or any of this work would require detailed and painstaking analysis—school by school, department by department, discipline by discipline, with all of the nuances of purpose, expectation, and aspiration kept in mind. At an early stage, the creator has possession of all the exclusive rights granted by copyright, and so the choice of how and whether to make work publicly accessible will be completely in their hands

CC licenses allow the author/creator to maintain attribution and to determine the extent to which the material is used. Applying CC licenses to materials such as those mentioned above, allow the creator to establish a clear path for use, adaptation, and distribution. The advantages of making use of the CC licenses are multiple. A prominent advantage is that creators can clearly state their desires and expectations for the (re)use of their creations. Users coming to the material have clear instructions on what they may or may not do with the material. The CC license rests on the foundation of copyright, and unless the creator dedicates their work to the Public Domain, copyright continues undisturbed. The creator can define the way in which they choose to share elements of their “exclusive rights” under copyright, without ceding any of their own rights to make use of the material as they see fit. CreativeCommons.org has monitored the legal decisions that have involved CC licenses. So far, the decisions have supported the validity of the licenses. See https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Case_Law for a review of case law so far.

Lawyers and Deeds

 There are multiple layers to the licenses. As time has passed since the first licenses were issued in 2002, the CC organization has adapted them to meet expressed needs and to incorporate the results of their continued analysis.  The layers include the “lawyer readable” text, which is the legally binding version of the licenses, the “human readable” text or “commons deeds,” which is what most of us as creators and users will use for guidance and decision making, and finally the “machine readable” or “CC Rights Expression Language” that summarizes the key elements for use granted and the obligations asserted in a technology, search engine friendly format.*  Exploration into these three layers, belies the simplicity of the familiar “human readable” interface, and some of the elements, including noncommercial, or ShareAlike, may be less intuitive than we expect, but, for the most part, a scholar, coming to these licenses should be able to discern the license that will work best for them, and meet all of their needs and concerns.

Here is what you need to know to get started–and be sure to visit creativecommons.org to fully explore your options and understand to your comfort level, the motivation and purpose behind this suite of licenses.

Four Elements Can Be Combined to make Six

There are four elements (each with their own icon), that come together in a variety of ways to create six licenses (also with accompanying imagery). Since 2002, the licenses have gone through five iterations (1.0, 2.0, 2.5, 3.0, and 4.0). CC urges creators to make use of the most recent versions—which are designated as 4.0

The four elements are

• BY — as in created “by whom”?–All licenses require the re-user to give credit or attribution:
  • 

• SA, or ShareAlike. This means that if you use or incorporate CC-SA licensed material into your new creation, you must share your new work under a compatible license. The spirit of the CC-SA license must stay with the material even if it is adapted or transformed.
  • 

• NC, or Noncommercial, means that the work can only be used for noncommercial purposes. Noncommercial does not apply to the user, the user could be the Disney Corporation, as long as their purpose is noncommercial – for instance, making use of a figure you’ve created to brighten up packets of food that they have made available at a disaster location—and that preferably (to my mind) wouldn’t include their corporate logo. A hypothetical case, of course.
  • 

• ND, or No derivative, means the work cannot be adapted AND shared. If the user does adapt the work, they cannot share it publicly.
  • 

These four elements and their icons combine into six licenses (click on the icons inserted below to get all the details about the license and to get started using them).

The Mighty Six (If you look up “famous sixes” in Google, you get a lot of links to great moments in Cricket)

1. Attribution license — CC BY allows users to use the material in any way as long as they provide attribution to the creator. This is the most open of the six licenses. For an even more open approach, see “Public Domain” below.

2. Attribution-ShareAlike license — CC BY SA. Based on the description of ShareAlike above, you can guess that this means you can do what you like with the CC BY SA licensed creation as long as you provide attribution and share the resulting work under a similar license. It is also recommended that you provide a link or other information that directs potential users of your creation to the original upon which yours is based.

3. Attribution-NonCommercial license–CC BY NC. If you apply this license to your work, you are letting future users know that you expect them to give proper credit and that your intended use cannot be commercial. It is written into the licenses that if a user violates a term of license, such as the requirement for noncommercial use, their right to use the licensed creation can be revoked if the violation isn’t corrected within 30 days.

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license—CC BY NC SA. Are you starting to understand how these licenses work? Yep—If you are going public with your own creation, either containing or adapted from the original licensed work, you must share it under a similar license, and that includes no commercial use

5. Attribution-NoDerivatives license–CC BY ND. The restrictions increase as we work our way through the licenses. This license drops the “noncommercial” but incorporates “no derivatives.” This means that the licensed work must be used as you found it. You can’t add a mustache and then make notecards that you are going to sell online or at a farmer’s market. You can’t turn the novel into a play or film script and then distribute it to the public, commercially or noncommercially. It is possible that the creator would allow you to do this, but you would have to seek permission.

6. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license–CC BY NC ND. Finally, the most restrictive of the six licenses restricts both the ability to adapt a work that you plan to share and restricts commercial use of the item.

You can “insert” the image or embed the html code into your work, linking to its accompanying documentation.

Wait, There’s More

In a previous post, we talked about the four factors of Fair Use. Regardless of any restrictions incorporated into the six CC licenses, Fair Use outranks all of them. If you are a re-user, and your use falls within the framework of Fair Use, should your use be challenged, you should be able to defend yourself on the grounds of Fair Use. Should this really become an issue and you were to end up in court, you will likely want to consult with a lawyer. But, the rumor is that the CC using community is a reasonable group of people filled with good will and the will to share. It is possible that you would be able to discuss your use with the creator and come to an amicable agreement that suits both your needs and the creator’s expectations. Remember, no matter what, it is always best to give credit where credit is due. You will want the same!

Stairway to Open Access

We promised to say something about the Public Domain, but you were younger then and had a greater ability to concentrate. But, just in case you’re hanging in there–Copyright lasts a long time, but it does run out, and at different times in its history, it has run out sooner rather than later. That means there is a great deal of creative work that is in the public domain. This is just a legal situation. Many of the great classic works of literature from all literary cultures are in the public domain. In the United States, most works published before 1923 are in the Public Domain, Government Documents are immediately in the public domain, and a creator can dedicate their own work to the Public Domain. CC has what they call a Public Domain Dedication, CC0.

This puts your work out there with no restrictions whatsoever. Barnes and Nobles could add your novel to their nice and inexpensive edition series, someone could use an image of your painting as the cover of their next scholarly work without asking permission or paying royalties or being challenged in the future. Once something is in the public domain, copyright does not apply. Since Creative Commons licenses are based on copyright, they do not apply either.

For your Consideration

Why would you want to apply a CC license rather than dedicate your work to the Public Domain? Certainly, if you are planning on publishing your work, with either a not-for-profit or for-profit publisher, you’ll be likely to find that your publisher will want to be able to acquire some of your rights at least for a time before making it freely available (read your contract!). Beyond that, applying a CC license allows you to maintain control over your own work and how it is used: you’ll have some assurance that the integrity of your work will not be compromised, that your name remains associated with your own work, and that you have a better chance of challenging  potential misuse or misinterpretation of your work. The CC licenses also allow you to disassociate yourself from adaptations that might be put to uses that are anathema to you.

A last word on Open Access and Creative Commons Licenses

What if you want to incorporate something into your own creation that is in the Public Domain? Go right ahead! However, when you apply that CC license to your newly created work that is built, in whole or in part, on elements from a public domain work, you can only license the unique elements of your work – you cannot license the public domain aspects of your new work. Once in the public domain, always in the public domain. Disney Corporation can’t, for instance, stop you from using the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. The original fairytale is in the public domain. They can, however, prevent you from using the music from its animation, or for using the names its writers and artists created for those seven dwarves, or using images derived from their animation . . .

 Say the word and you’ll be free..

*Language adapted from segment 3.1 of the Creative Commons Certificate Course

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Little Tour Through Copyright–Get Your Feet Wet: a Dramatic Dialogue

Characters:

• C.W. (Creative Writer)
• K.R.F. (Knowledgeable Reasonable Friend) 

Chapter 1

The Purpose of Copyright
or
Protecting My Right to Figure out What To Do With My Own Creative Work

 

C.W. I’m writing a novel and pasting each chapter into my blog. I’m a little worried  that someone else might make one of those $1 AmaRzonia books out of it. What can I do to make sure that no one uses my work without asking me? I want people to read it. I’d love someone to illustrate it, gosh, I wouldn’t even mind if someone translated it into Japanese or Czech (as long as they ask me first). I just don’t want someone else to pretend it is their work or, you know, sell it and make a profit off my work without talking with me first…

K.R.F. You’re in luck! Our founding fore-parents borrowed a legal concept from their fore-mother’s government. That legal concept was written up in the Statute of Anne of 1710.  It gave authors protection from having their works copied by others. Our fore-parents, back in the earliest days of the USA spelled that out just a little further.

They wrote into the U.S. Constitution what we call the Copyright clause — Creators have the exclusive right to decide what happens to their own work for a limited time, and, this is the good part, to promote “the progress of science and the useful arts.” In other words, to make the world, or at least our corner of it, safe to create. Because, ideas lead to creations, which lead to ideas, which lead to new creations. We learn from each other.

Chapter 2

Lucky Sure, But How Much Does it Cost?

 

K.R.F. So, CW, no need to worry. The law has changed and evolved since its birth in 1790, but, this you can count on, the minute you set your fingers to your keyboard and your words begin to appear on the screen, and, through digital magic, they become fixed into the tangible (at least in legal terms) medium of your blog, they are protected by copyright. It is automatic! No form to fill out and no money to pay. And the words as they appear on that screen are exclusively yours until you decide to share some of your exclusive rights with someone else. Legally, someone has to ask you for permission to publish any part of your novel in a magazine, or to post it to their own blog, or to turn your creative work into an animated film. Ethically, they should always give you credit for your work as well. Even if your work wasn’t copyrighted (and it is!), it is never acceptable to take credit for someone else’s works.

C.W. I do like the sound of that, KRF. It seems pretty straightforward. My novel is my own. Those fore-parents thought of everything didn’t they?

Chapter 3

Interpretation is a Skill
or
Call My Lawyer

 

K.R.F. Er, well, CW, I guess it all depends on what those fore-parents meant by “limited time” and “exclusive rights” and “promote.” Those fore-parents thought their future generations would think just as they did and would figure it out on their own. So, they left the wording with room for interpretation. Hello Litigation!

C.W. Aw, come on KRF, what’s wrong with a little flexibility in the interpretation? It means they aren’t telling me what I can’t do. But I guess they aren’t telling my readers what they can’t do either and, come to think of it, it sure is easy to make a digital copy of a digital original. Click, copy, Click, paste. Done. Hmmm. Not sure what I think of that. What if my blog novel turns out to be the next Parry Hotter? I’d have a lot to lose with all that clicking and pasting. I could make some serious money. How important is that “promote” stuff anyway…grrrrr …. I’m hanging on to my exclusive rights, for sure . . .

K.R.F. Slow down, CW, Before you get too worried, let’s back up a bit and think a little more about copyright and what the fore-parents meant to accomplish. First of all, Copyright does, without a doubt, protect your right to be acknowledged as the creator and it protects the integrity of your  work. In fact, “exclusive rights” means that you, for the most part can control copying, distributing, performance, adaptation, translation, anthologizing, and even who gets to make a profit off of your work.

C.W. Well, that’s a good thing.

K.R.F. But… copyright law also recognizes that your work isn’t much good to our society or culture, or even you, the creative mind behind it,  if no one can make use of it–that is read it, share it with a friend, quote from it in a review or critique, and well any number of things. But if your readers, or anyone interested in making some use of your work, don’t ask you, the rights holder, for permission, you can tell them to stop. Most significant uses of a creative work or, as a copyright expert might prefer, creative expression, can only happen within a certain framework.

C.W. Huh, Tell me more about that framework. I’m all ears.

“I’m All Ears” by Alan Levine is licensed under CC BY 2.0 (It is possible, that A. Levine doesn’t have permission to reproduce this sculpture, so while he allows reproducing his photograph, I  might not have permission to represent this sculpture, … RS)

Chapter 4

In Which CW Learns a Little Bit More About
What KRF Calls the Framework for Copyright

 

K.R.F. First of all, CW, you are writing a novel, right? Tell me a little bit about what you are writing.

C.W. Well, the story is set in the future when space travel is easy and pretty common place. The very rich decided to move to a planet that is cleaner and more pristine than Earth. The main character is a thoughtful and educated woman.  The only way she can earn money is by being a governess. She finds a job, but the family lives in one of these rich-people colonies on the other planet. It turns out that she ends up working in this kind of spooky mansion. The father is a bit grumpy and the mother seems to be missing, or maybe she’s bumping around in their gravity free detachable attic. Before the end of the novel, I think I’ll have the father visited by three spirits representing the past, present, and future. You know, to allow for a character transformation . . . in case I have him ask the governess to marry him. There has to be some good reason (besides money) that she’d do that. I guess that will depend on whether the mother is in that attic or not. I’m also thinking about having the mansion go up in a big fire. I think it will be a pretty dramatic ending.

K.R.F. That’s interesting, CW. Hmmm. I’m pretty sure I recognize some of those plot lines, but you’re in luck, because I think all of those plot lines appeared in novels written before 1923 (the date is significant, but that can wait for another day), so they are pretty solidly within the public domain.

Chapter 5

KRF takes a Diversion into the Public Domain
or
The Happy, Welcoming Place

 

C.W. Oh no, so you recognized the plot? Rats. I’m almost afraid to ask, because I’m getting kind of hungry, but … what is public domain?

K.R.F. Here have some Yummy cHips®*, I’m just getting started. Yes, Public Domain. Public Domain is related to copyright. When a creative work is in the public domain, it means that there are no individual rights holders, it belongs to everyone. (Pause for fireworks)

[Photo art work by AngMoKio. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license. ]

K.R.F. Copyright does not apply. But, if you don’t want people to think you’re trying to get away with reusing plot lines without sharing the glory, it will be good form for you to give credit to the original authors or creators, maybe in the preface to your blog novel. Their works did provide you with inspiration after all — their creativity led to your creativity. And that is just what the authors of the copyright clause had in mind! (More fireworks!) Remember, when you’re worrying about what your users will do, you are a user too. If those works weren’t in the public domain, you’d have to throw your novel out and start over again with some completely original ideas. That might be quite hard.

C.W. All right, I’m starting to get the point. A lot more people will hear about my novel, if someone reads it and then tells their friend or even writes a review or links to it on their blog? After all, it’s already on my blog, which is freely available anyway. It isn’t like I’m going to charge for it, but I’d feel bad if someone else made money off of it when I was just giving it away. You never know, I may want to market it someday.

Chapter 6

Hunger is Satisfied, But Hunger for Knowledge Continues
KRF Returns to Explaining Copyright

 

K.R.F. You’re in good shape. Copyright clearly protects you in those cases. Unless you give permission, no one else can sell your work, publish it or distribute it. They can link to it. And, as you now understand, It would be unethical and illegal for someone to use any part of it without crediting you, even if you are making it freely available to anyone. (There are exemptions and limitations to that … but, I’ll bring out some more food when we get to that point in our conversation.)

C.W. So is anything I post on my blog covered by copyright? What if I do a running news feed listing all the cars that drive by my window while I’m writing my blog novel (distractions!), or if I make a list of the number of people that walk by on the street.

Chapter 7

K.R.F. Mentions Facts and Ideas

 

K.R.F. Those are just lists of facts and facts can’t be copyrighted. Now, if you told a little story about each car and created characters for all of those people walking by your window and turned that into a poem or a series of short stories, then you’d be covered by copyright. But just a factual list? No, that wouldn’t be something you can copyright.

C.W. Okay, well, what if I said, I’m thinking about writing a story about a guy who goes to war in a foreign country and spends ten years on the beach fighting and scheming and dreaming about home, and then when the war is finally over, somehow, he gets lost and tries to pick up some riches here and there and even visits the dead and it is another ten years until he actually returns home, and then, whew, watch out! … Can I copyright that idea?

K.R.F. There are a couple of reasons why you can’t copyright that idea, but according to the letter of the law, an idea is just an idea. If it you have a very unique idea, I probably wouldn’t post it anywhere public. I’d write it down (fixed and tangible form) and tuck it away until I was ready to work on it or collaborate with someone. That particular idea you just described? … well, someone already got to it a few thousand years before you and many an author has worked it into their creative writing in some fashion whether they knew it or not. Of course,  luckily for them and you, the work that plot comes from is in the public domain. You seem to have a flair for adapting work, CW, so I wouldn’t worry about it. That plot outline will be waiting for you when you need it. And just so you know this is more than my opinion, here is what Copyright.gov has to say about facts and ideas.

https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html

C.W. KRF, you are making my head hurt. You’re feeding me a lot of information (and you consistently suggest that my ideas are not original). Let’s get back to the matter at hand … how long do I have this copyright protection on my blog novel?

K.R.F. You are well taken care of — copyright doesn’t last forever, but it will last you for your lifetime, PLUS 70 years. So, you can relax. Your governess on that hospitable planet with the floating attic is all yours for the next 100 or so years. Of course, those parts you borrowed from the public domain novels? Those bits are still in the public domain: your governess, the mother in the attic, the grumpy dad, and the three character transforming spirits are all still in play.

Chapter 8

Traveling into Murky Territory

 

C.W. Hey, here is something I hadn’t thought of. I might want to do a series of novels, and give the series a catchy title, like “To Catch Some Thieves,” or “Seven Sisters for Seven Brides.” Yeah, that would be good, each novel would feature a governess, and they would all be sisters! I can’t think yet what the seven brides would be, but I like the way that sentence scans. Anyway, how do I make sure no one else uses that series name?

K.R.F. You’ll want a second opinion on this. There is something called Trademark. Like, we all say “Kleenex,” but that is a trademarked name for a product that you could call “a tissue.” Technically, you can trademark brand names, slogans, and logos that are used to sell things. So, normally you wouldn’t trademark the title of your book – but if you use the series title to help draw attention to your work or to sell a series, then you can trademark it. You’d have to make sure that no one else had trademarked it. You’d better check out Trademark Basics at https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks-getting-started/trademark-basics. They have a 42-minute video there and they recommend you get an “experienced trademark attorney.” It seems to be more complicated than copyright (which is already complicated).

From the United States Patent and Trademark Office (or USPTO):

The USPTO has another video that is only 8 minutes that describes the difference between copyright, trademark, and something we haven’t talked about yet, patents. But, really, that is for inventions. You haven’t invented anything have you? Patent law comes out of that same Article 1, Clause 8. Here it is again, you’ve eaten a lot of Yummy cHips®* since I ran that by you (Clause 8 that is). This time, you can take a close look at the terms,”science,” “inventors,” and “discoveries.” Inventors also get a limited time to enjoy exclusive rights:

C.W. So, did you say there was something else to eat? Maybe something that will wash down all of these chips?

K.R.F. Sure, CW, sorry I didn’t give you this Fizzy dRink®* earlier. Let’s see what is in my fridge –oh, here are some grapes. Eat up. Anything else?

Chapter 9

The Thirst For Knowledge Leads CW into
The Realm of Fair Use

 

C.W. Since I’ve got grapes and Fizzy dRink®* now, I’ll take a risk and ask about those exemptions and limitations. I do feel like I ought to have the big picture.

K.R.F. Those limitations and exemptions are pretty important for creative expressors to know about and for those making use of the expressors’ expressions. There is something in the United States called Fair Use. Other countries have something like it too, but in the US,  we call it “fair use.” Basically, it ensures that the rights of the public are not unduly limited by copyright law. For instance, if I want to review your blog novel, I might need to quote from it. If I decide I’m going to write my dissertation on your blog novel, I might have to quote multiple chunks. Of course, I can’t reproduce so much that someone can read my dissertation and then have no need to read your book. If you’re lucky, they’ll read my dissertation and then race off to their computer to read your entire blog novel and then tweet about it. Before you know it, Parry Hotter.

In US Fair Use law, there are what are called four factors. If you were to take someone to court for infringing on your copyright, their use of your blog novel would be judged on these four factors:

1. The purpose and character of their use
2. The nature of your copyrighted work
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion of your blog novel that they incorporated into their own work, and
4. The effect of their use on your potential market (if, for instance, your work did turn out to be the next Parry Hotter).

Looking at some of these words and phrases, “substantiality”, “potential market”, “purpose and character of use,” we find that, just as in the original clause, there is room for interpretation. And, you don’t get cleared for being cleared on one factor, the judge will look at all the factors. In the same way, you can’t claim that they’ve failed the test by looking at one factor. They all come into play and the judge will decide.

Some uses that might otherwise infringe on copyright, are pretty solid, and that is making copies for educational purposes (at least once anyway), for scholarly and critical purposes, and to aid the vision impaired. You can also make parodies of a work, and you can do something really transformative with a work (a lot of people use collage as an example of “really transformative”). Nothing is straightforward though. And that is why lawyers specialize in copyright law and why so many cases end up in the courts. Which, also means that only some people can afford to protect their copyrights.

 

“Sad Ernie” by wonderferret is licensed under CC BY 2.0

K.R.F. Hey, CW, are you still awake? You seem be face down in the grapes and you knocked your drink over.

Chapter 10

A Happy Ending

 

C.W.  I heard everything, I just feel like, thinking about court cases and “exemptions and limitations” and even Jolly Old St. Copyright Clause is sort of sapping all the creative excitement out of me. How am I ever going to work that gravity free attic into my blog novel if I’m calculating exemptions and limitations not to mention remembering life plus 70 years?

K.R.F. There is something called Creative Commons licensing that you can apply to your works. It doesn’t change the fact that your work is protected by copyright law, nor does it override the Famous Four Factors. But it does allow you to clearly state what the public can do with your creative expression. That might be a relief for you. You can permit users to do anything they want, and you can be more conservative. But it is completely clear to whomever uses your work what you, the creator, will allow them to do with your work. Attribution, that ethical obligation to give credit to the original creator, is part of every Creative Commons license, even CC 0, which allows you to donate your work to the public domain. Users are still urged to give proper credit. Certainly, to do otherwise would fall into the world of plagiarism. You can avoid that when you provide attribution.

Hooray, I think we’re done with our whirlwind tour through copyright and we waded in far enough to get wet up to our ankles. After I clean up this Fizzy dRink®*  you spilled, I’m going to have a big bowl of blueberries and yoghurt. I’m pretty sure they are in the public domain, and I can eat them without permission.

*poetically licensed TM

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

A Brief History of Creative Commons: “From Struggle to Snuggle”

Creative Commons is all about creators, sharing and collaboration. It is founded on the belief that “knowledge and creativity are building blocks of our culture rather than simple commodities for market value” (Creative Commons Certificate video, 1.2 Creative Commons Today). CC licenses serve to protect your work, ensuring that the creator receives proper credit (or attribution), but they also liberate a creative work so that it can be a catalyst for creation by others. This creation as catalyst for future creation was actually the original intent of the authors of the constitution. The Copyright Clause of the US Constitution was devised”to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries” (see Justia: Origins and Scope of Power for one discussion of Article 1. Clause 8 of the US Constitution). Notice that the wording in the Constitution is “ to promote” rather than “to protect.”

This clause comes with much interpretation and has gone through a long series of legislative and legal transformations from the “Copyright Act of 1790” through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and multiple treaties and court cases.  (See the Association of Research Libraries’ Copyright timeline.) In current legislation, the phrase “Exclusive Rights” has been magnified and the phrase “limited Times” has receded into a dark corner. There is a safeguard for those who are using the creative works. Section 107 of the Copyright Act introduces the Fair Use Doctrine, which provides limitations on the creator’s “exclusive rights” to ensure that users are able to make reasonable use of copyrighted materials (see Copyright.gov Subject Matter and Scope of Copyright). More on the Fair Use Doctrine another time (visit Copyright.gov to review the four factors  that are at the heart of the doctrine).

Relevant to this discussion of Creative Commons, though, is that the four factors that make up the Fair Use Doctrine, like the original Copyright Clause, are written with enough ambiguity to leave them open to  significant interpretation and to the creation of non-legally binding guidelines that serve to provide some rationalized approach to their application. This ambiguity allows a certain amount of flexibility in the interpretation, which is good for users. But, as formats proliferate and copying and sharing can be done with a few simple keystrokes, the ease of use comes into conflict with the desire to control.

Over time, Congress has responded to efforts to extend the copyright holder’s exclusive rights.  The goal of “promoting the progress of Science and useful Arts,” has faded over time. The “limited time” provided for in the 1790 Act was 14 years with the possibility of renewing for another 14 years if the author applied for Copyright.  Currently, the amended US Copyright Act provides for exclusive rights for a period of 70 years after the creator’s death. That is a long time to wait to be able to sample a line of music into a new sound mix or to create an animated film of a popular work, or to write fan literature that spins off a popular young adult book series, or even hold a young adult book series themed costume party at a public library. You might find that copyright holders object to these things  transpiring without explicit permission and without the payment of royalties.

Here is where you, as the creator, can make a difference with the help of Creative Commons licenses. Creative Commons licenses provide a clear path to the future use of created works and CC license users select the level of use permitted for their works—no interpretation involved. If someone wants to use your work, the answer is in the CC license.

Let’s look a little closer at the different events that led to the development of Creative Commons licensing. It isn’t surprising that it has something to do with the growth of the internet and the explosion of new digital formats. The Internet, especially as manifested in the World Wide Web, has made it a piece of cake to share material. Digital formats have made it easier than ever to make copies of works, whether they were originally digital or analog.

Digital technologically accelerated the ease of sharing and this ease came into conflict with the Copyright Law. It has made the commercial publishing world quite nervous.  For the creators themselves, digital technologies, together with the Web, have provided new opportunities to reach audiences, but they have also made it harder for creators to collect payment on their work (think of recording artists)

Pressure to enforce copyright law and to extend copyright term really ramped up in the 1990s. One of the more significant changes to the Copyright Act came with the passage of what is known as the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act of 1998.  (See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act for an extensive and somewhat disheartening discussion of the Extension Act). This act, also known as the Micky Mouse Protection Act, essentially amended Title 17 of the United States Code to add twenty years to every mention of date or length of term of copyright. Thus, the nickname, because the act went into effect just in time to protect Disney’s first Micky Mouse animations.

[This image is taken from the actual text of the Extension Act. As a publication of the United States Government it is in the public domain. ]

The funny thing about this extension act (and this is my personal opinion) is that while it could be construed to protect the rights of the creators, it often provides the most protection to the producers and distributors of the creative work. Creators of intellectual and artistic works often give away the exclusive rights provided them by copyright law to the producers and distributors via contracts. Thus, they receive benefits to a greater and lesser degree according to the contract they sign with the publisher or producer. It isn’t uncommon for contracts to reassign exclusive rights to the publisher.

Creative Commons licenses put control back into the hands of the creators. The licenses do not replace or subvert copyright, they just allow creators to share their agency with the user at the level to which they feel comfortable.

Another important legal milestone, one which directly influenced the establishment of the Creative Commons organization and its licensing platform, was the Eldred v. Ashcroft case, which challenged the constitutionality of the 1998 Copyright Extension Act. The Washington Post’s 2003 “Tech.News.com” (January 15, 2003) column, provides this summery of the case:

The Eldred argument: Online publisher Eric Eldred and Stanford University professor Lawrence Lessig think that Congress violated the Constitution when it passed laws that let copyright owners renew the ownership rights to their works.

The government and entertainment industry argument: The Constitution allows copyrights for a “limited” period and does not preclude Congress from extending the terms of existing copyrights. Lower courts have backed this point of view. The Walt Disney Co., the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America are among the groups opposing the Eldred/Lessig argument.

Lawrence Lessig, the founder of Creative Commons, argued on behalf of Eldred in this case. He posited that the Extension Act violated the First Amendment of the Constitution.  He also asserted that Congress overstepped its authority in adding the extensions to already existing copyrighted works. The Supreme Court voted 7-2 against Eldred and thus Creative Commons licensing was born—a grassroots effort to give creators and audiences a transparent means for working together.

It might be more accurate to say that Lawrence Lessig’s work on the Eldred Case planted the seeds for the development of Creative Commons. The lawsuit lost an earlier appeal in 2001 and the CC organization released its first licenses in 2002. Lessig, in a 2005 blog post, provides a substantive narrative that describes the Creative Commons vision for licensing. Transparency is the key. This paragraph from his blog post sums it up nicely:

And thus, the motivation for CC licenses: A simple way for authors and artists to express the freedoms they want their creativity to carry. Creators who want to say “All Rights Reserved” need not apply. But creators who want just “Some Rights Reserved” could use our licenses to express that idea simply. And individuals and institutions that wanted to use work they’ve found on the Internet could do so without fearing they would be confused with those who believe in “No Rights Respected” when it comes to copyright.

A more recent description at the CC Website states,  “One goal of Creative Commons is to increase the amount of openly licensed creativity in “the commons” — the body of work freely available for legal use, sharing, repurposing, and remixing.”

Creative Commons licensing is easy to understand.  A creator may apply the most open license on their work, placing it in the “public domain,” or retain more control through applying an  “Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives” license to their work.

[Taken from the CC Web site, Share Your Work—Licensing Types—Licenses and Examples]

Visiting the CC Web site enables you to explore the different licenses, embed the appropriate symbols in your work, and to fully understand which rights you are sharing and which you are retaining.

Today more than 1.4 billion works, in all formats, have CC licenses. It is used by individuals, institutions, and on major media platforms (https://search.creativecommons.org) including Flikr, Wikipedia, Wikimedia, Europeana, Metropolitan Museum of Art, YouTube, and even Google Images. The licenses have become ubiquitous and are well known within the open community. The search in the image below helps you search the major platforms specifically for CC licensed material.

[https://search.creativecommons.org/]

Where will the organization go from here?

Creative Commons has always been a not-for-profit organization. Its staff are distributed geographically, which enables the organization to work effectively with creators and with open initiatives across borders and cultures.  As an organization, it continues to shepherd its licensing program and it supports the open movement internationally. In its newest strategic plan, Creative Commons points to adopting a growing role in fostering a “global commons” through which they will strive to improve the discovery of cultural and intellectual creations, provide methods of support for creators and further develop the means for greater collaboration among creators and creative communities. As a third goal, Creative Commons will advocate for policies that support openness generally and copyright reform specifically.

Creative Commons supports a “Global Network” of sharing, which includes open initiatives such as Open Data, Open Software, Open Educational Resources (OER), crowdsourcing, Open Science, and Open Innovation. You can find an excellent 2012 exposition on these initiatives at The Conversation, an open, academically oriented site for evidence based journalism.  In addition, check out UNESCO’s Global Open Access Portal for a thematic and regional tour of initiatives and movements. You can see CC at work there, as UNESCO states that

“All country and region description pages in the Global Open Access Portal are available under CC-BY-SA IGO 3.0.”

You can read CC’s full strategic plan or visit their “Strategy and Ideas” page to learn more about the future of sharing with the Creative Commons organization.

This blog post is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0

Future of Education Week 2 opening and concluding reflection

What is intelligence? it is the ability to successfully navigate within the world in which you find yourself. It develops out of a particular cultural environment and does not necessarily translate across cultures. I think that there must also be something biological — a sort of use it or lose it aspect. That the brain grows and develops and changes, and if it is neglected it becomes less agile and even dormant. I experience my brain as a physical feeling–sometimes it is muddled, sometimes all the pieces are moving around and getting into order and the thoughts come clearly–and the whole body responds positively. Other times, the pieces are spinning in chaotic paths, not connecting–and the body is exhausted. Intelligence is being able to understand and to accomplish what you want to accomplish, whether that is reading and writing, cooking, experimenting, gardening, farming, building, navigating.

I do consider myself to be intelligent–not always smart. I’ve been told that I was intelligent since I can remember. I am intelligent when it comes to reading and writing — both skills I continue to develop. I was first a “colorer” and then I learned to read and that was what I always wanted to do most with my time. Writing was harder and I continue to work at it and learn from having others edit my writing and from doing and reading and reading and doing. I am better at expressing myself in writing than I am at expressing my ideas through speaking. I do not know science and find it hard to listen to people as they talk about scientific theories or practices. If the language is literary I can make sense of it, if it is technical–not so well. Business speak disturbs me and my brain shuts down–it is words swirling around in a big database of text.

If I want to do something and I have the energy and drive I can figure it out. I’m a musician so my brain does get exercised in a lot of different ways. I like working with foreign languages. I am interested in all kinds of things which is good for being a librarian faced with working in many areas, not as great for being a specialist. So, am I really intelligent? I’m not really sure. I work hard and often lack discipline. Maybe intelligence is a practice more than an inherent state of being.

The discussion on ability in the video interviews suggests that intelligence may be a practice. We can learn, but we have to be in the practice of learning. When I am meeting with students about research, I try to encourage them to think of it as a skill that one develops. At first it is time consuming and painstaking. Although it continues to take time and persistence, the process becomes second nature–like riding a bicycle. We aren’t born with the skills to thoroughly investigate a question or to critically evaluate the material that we must absorb on our way through that investigation, but it can become a process that we are good at and enjoy and desire to be involved in. Learning can be like climbing a mountain–it can bring us great satisfaction. If we’re lucky what we learn, we can pass on to others, and perhaps nudge the course of human history (thinking more locally than epochly) in better direction.

Future of Education Week 1 final reflection

Although I am skeptical about the generalized use of MOOCs as a substitute for in person learning, I have listened in on several that I feel fortunate to have connected with (and of course a couple, one in particular with a similar title to this one, that I was extremely disappointed in). Having spent a little time with the “Understanding Research Methods” mooc from the University of London, I was optimistic about what this MOOC would offer. And, this morning, while making scones, I listened to the first two weeks of videos. I am not disappointed. I love the thoughtful and intelligent interviews–no jokes, no funny hats, no condescension, but a genuine opportunity to hear scholars who care about their topics being asked serious questions and answering them in a clear and understandable way. I am hearing people talk about the educational process in a way that shows that 1) they care about the topic and 2) care about communicating their ideas.https://rebeccastuhr.wordpress.com/2014/10/04/future-of-education-blog-reflection-week-1/

I mentioned in the first post that I often have one chance in a class room–I found myself listening to the lectures and thinking about how I could better present the next few class sessions I am giving in the upcoming week. How can I teach by asking questions rather than spouting the information–something I always  try to do (ask questions)–but in thinking about the process with these lectures I came up with a slightly new idea. I also found the lecture on ability so important! I live in Philadelphia, a city of gross disparities in economic, social, and educational opportunities. Everyone who can goes to a private school. The public schools are all but bankrupt, teachers and other professionals and aids have been laid off, turn over is rampant. There are teachers and community members who care deeply about make the situation better for all children in the city. Still, the opportunities are few and the chances of being left behind or further deprived are high. I find that their are many, probably privileged, students who make their way into the local ivy league institution–even they have difficulty listening and absorbing small pieces of information — how much worse for students without many of the advantages these university attending students have had? I don’t have the answers of course, and I don’t know how a theory of “expert learning” translates into change the possibilities for those who haven’t had the chance to connect with possibilities, but maybe some ideas will arise.

Too much rambling–but I do feel that whether I manage all the reading or continue with the reflections (I hope I do because writing is a way that I learn and consolidate and make concrete my thoughts) I will gain something from these thoughtful presentations.

Future of Education Blog-Reflection Week 1

As a librarian who works with students on a more or less anonymous basis–one stop classroom appearances, chat reference–they see my name I don’t necessarily see theirs–, one time appointments, emails (names no faces)–I am always thinking about how to better connect and how to share information in a way that is engaging and that stays between the ears, rather than the old in one ear out the other. My first very exciting learning moment was my first year of college. We read a book by a couple of Americans who, as I remember (distant past now) were caught in the re-education process in Maoist China. We read the book and the authors came to a special session of our class. I remember being wildly exhilarated because I had had the opportunity to ask all the questions I wanted–questions that built on the information I was acquiring through my own previous questions and the questions of others. We were a small group, the authors were completely open and I was gaining understanding. I remember going right back to my dorm room and writing to one of my high school teachers about the experience. Poor learning experiences are unfortunately all too frequent. The Webinar a number one culprit. I seem to always be optimistic–signing up once again for a promising sounding hour. There are so many things we need to keep up with as librarians, sadly, many of the webinars are little more than infommercials–too specific, with too little broader application; they are “power points” that I could have saved precious time by reading myself rather than listening to someone read it; they are “bandwagonish”: providing too little food for thought and too much of what has been gleaned already from superficial investigation.

In addition, I’d like to comment on the lecture. A good lecture is a wonderful experience just as a well led discussion is completely exhilarating. There are just too many lectures where the speaker’s head is in his or her notes, too little vocal inflection, perhaps too late in the afternoon, and it becomes very hard too follow. But the lecture is not an inherent evil. A good lecturer leaves you wiser than you were before, ready to find out more, and grateful for the experience.

An Alternative Direction for Higher Education

I have worked in higher education for nearly 30 years, which means I’ve only not been connected with an educational institution as a student or employee (librarian)  for two or three years since starting school at age 5.  I was raised in an academically inclined household, my father has a Ph.D. and was a professor at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary. He went to Yale on a full scholarship. I don’t know whether or not there was any stigma attached to that scholarship, but I’m sure that he went to school with many young men whose parents had no problem paying the full tuition. When I went to school, I had 50% of my tuition covered by my college, my mother and father paid 25% and I covered the remaining 25% with student loans. I had work-study, and worked during the summers to have money to support myself during the academic year. I covered 25% of my four years of college with a student loan. I graduated  $4,000 in debt, which I took ten years to pay off. Doesn’t sound too bad does it? I could rent an apartment, pay for food, make plans for the future, and pay off my loan without feeling overwhelmed. It wasn’t that every family had $4,000 a year hanging around to pay for tuition, that is why 50% of my college costs were covered by my school. But it is also true that $2,000 is not equivalent to $30,000, which is what 50% of college tuition is likely to be today. It just isn’t the same thing, and it seems as though there is no end to the spiraling cost of education.

I find that when I find an article that addresses the state of student loans (that in some cases accumulate interest at 6.8% or 7.8% from day one), I find that the students are being blamed for placing themselves in the position of being burdened by impossible debt because they didn’t read the small print carefully, or they didn’t weigh their options by choosing a less expensive route, say two years of community college followed by two years of a state university. That also suggests that if $30,000 or more isn’t an insignificant amount of money for you, you have no business going to school that has tuition in that range. It isn’t the fault of the lender that students are burdened with this terrible debt upon graduation, it is the student’s fault for accepting the only terms available to them. And then we are back to a place where only the privileged are allowed the privilege of the best education with the most personal attention providing the greatest opportunity. I will just add for those of you who might not have thought of this yet. Our young up and coming generation is burdened by enormous debt during a time of high un- and under employment, unable to afford health insurance, or in many cases, live on their own. Doesn’t spell a positive future for any of us.

So, I am wrapped up in this vision of disparity and what I see as the irrevocable brokenness of higher education as we know it: Institutions as corporations, students as customers, schools as cost centers, services as revenue streams, branding and marketing to the potential full pay (who I understand have the entitlement to negotiate on just what full pay means) while putting the best quality education out of reach of the less advantaged.

What can be done? I’ve been formulating a scenario in my head over the past couple of years. While I believe that there is a place for organized educational institutions. My idea would not support the kind of research that takes place in major universities.  I think, nonetheless, that there has to be a quality alternative that operates in parallel and that will provide the personal attention and opportunity that is a hallmark of the best colleges and universities. We could be trendy and call it alt-ed, but I’ll just call it a parallel scenario for now. I imagine it as a cottage industry. It requires little infrastructure and serves a local community. It takes advantage of our wired and digital environment to make sure that each participant’s accomplishments are reviewed, shared, and will represent the equivalent of a transcript — albeit a much more detailed transcript than your typical list of grades.

As you read this, I am sure that you will be saying, but what about this, and how do we address that, and you haven’t thought about this. Well, remember, this is a parallel course. It isn’t meant to be the same, it is an alternative. The beauty of starting fresh is that you don’t have to reject anything or incorporate everything, you can take what you like from existing structures, but beyond that, we’re building from the bottom up. There can be more than one version, but in the end, the students have to have learned critical thinking and writing, public speaking, and to have delved deeply into subject areas associated with study in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. (And of course, I haven’t thought about everything and there would be many, many details to work out.)

My parallel scenario takes place in a small storefront, a kind of one room school room. Really, it could take place anywhere that is accessible and allows for sustained concentration that may include lectures, independent work, and group work. Cohorts would be small because the staff would be small and initially sustained by grants. Because the cohorts would be small, it would be possible for individuals to be at different levels in their educational process. The staff would determine the curriculum, which would likely center around the traditional disciplines, while individual student projects would reflect student interest. There is no intention that this would be an easier route or less demanding than a traditional course of studies. In fact, because there would no way for the students to go unnoticed, or to skip class, cheat on tests, fall asleep, text, Web surf, or otherwise be halfhearted about the program in such an intimate setting it might be much harder. This would be more than a flipped classroom. Much of the work required including class time would take place in the center. Arrangements would have to be made for access to journals, books, and databases, participation in inter-library loan. Perhaps there would be some kind of reciprocal agreements set up or grants jointly applied for with public libraries. We would further take advantage of the digital environment by making use of the electronic portfolio. All student work, including all comments on the work, would be filed into portfolios, that students would be able to take with them and that would be archived by the center. These portfolios would clearly demonstrate writing ability, videos might represent oral skills, content would demonstrate the ability to undertake research, synthesize information and to critically analyze texts and images of all kinds. The portfolios would be certified in the same way that transcripts are and clearly represent the successful student’s skills, knowledge, and expertise.

Students attending these cottage centers of higher education would not pay tuition. There might be work in kind, size would limit the level of paperwork (bureaucracy), but I acknowledge that long-term sustainability would have to be something that was worked toward. I don’t think it is impossible, and I think that there are academics out there who would enjoy and thrive as scholars in such an environment. They would be positive developments within communities, and could lead to some students going on to more traditional institutions for graduate degrees, or perhaps be all they need to pursue meaningful careers.

This is a first attempt to write down my ideas. I want to consider thinking this through and even envision setting something up within my working life.

Update August 7, 2013

Just after writing this idea up, a new article in the Chronicle of Higher Education described a scheme that has many similarities to my idea (you may need a subscription to view this article): http://proxy.library.upenn.edu:2092/blogs/bottomline/business-model-for-education-venture-calls-for-empowering-adjuncts/

The ideas differ in several respects, one of them being that the Chronicle article describes a for-profit enterprise that would grow and expand. My system would be not-for-profit, and a little bit more like a Montessori school–in that there is a basic concept of what a Montessori school should be, but each school is (or at least many are) stand alone and serves its local community. It isn’t a franchise. But it is good to see a similar idea out there that stresses the importance of personal attention — the author uses the term anti-MOOC (keeping class size at 25-30).

An Idea that came to me as I read Toni Weller’s History in the Digital Age (2013)

I’d like to talk about Weller’s introduction to History in the Digital Age and then an idea that came to me as I read it. Weller’s introduction is a gloss of the topics covered in the book as well as a brief description of the intended audience. Weller’s writes to historians who consider themselves to be “traditional historians” and  are unsure of what it means to practice digital history. Weller points out that most historians, whether they think of it as “digital” or not, are doing much of their work digitally by using email, searching the internet, working with scholarly databases, and participating in discussion lists. Weller makes the argument that scholars are failing to teach students conceptual issues related to working with digital resources and they therefore fail to apply “traditional historical methodologies to their everyday digital and online experiences.” What got me thinking was Weller’s discussion of the subjectivity of selection that has always been part of history (see Michael Grant’s Greek and Roman Historians: Information and Misinformation 1995). This has been true with printed documents–one civilization burns the documents of the civilization it defeats; power and social status have something to do with whose voices survive and are preserved. Although libraries and museums seek to be objective, they are also serving a particular community and the ephemera of ten or one hundred years ago that wasn’t considered important enough for preservation, is today’s coveted primary source. When we choose what to collect and preserve we are undertaking a selective act. This is true as we create databases of documents and decide what to mark up and code.

What born digital material should we preserve? What will represent this time and place? How will we represent the original experience of the use of the Web sites, blogs, emails and texts that we manage to save? Weller writes: “The potential black hole of source material for the future historian is every bit as compelling as the traditional discourses of the lost voices in history–the illiterate, women, the poor or other minority groups” (9). We are faced with finding a way to effectively preserve an abundance of data, broadly representative of all that is out there, but also of preserving aspects of the context of its original use, and the technology through which it was originally viewed and created.

I have an idea that came to me as I was reading this introduction. My idea doesn’t address preservation of the voice of the powerless, but it does address the community with whom I work. It also takes into account the user’s experience with the item and provides at least a minimal amount of context. I do not think that it would be easy to carry out and it would rely on voluntary participation.

We (the libraries) would give hard drives to members of the university community, including staff, faculty, and students, both graduate students and undergraduate students. We would ask them to download the Web sites, listservs, electronic journals and newsletters they visit, the blogs they visit, comment on, or write, the notes they take (digitally or on paper). Essentially, we would ask them to save all the work they do in the course of conducting research, preparing for classes (as instructor or student), or assisting students or colleagues. The libraries would periodically swap out the hard drives to download everything into a database or repository.  It would have to take the form of a dark archive for a certain period of time. Practically, you could only ask the participants to do this over a certain period of time and perhaps on designated days, or even one week out of every month for a set period of time. A participant’s relevant written documents could be scanned and added to the hard drive.  There would have to be an easy way developed for adding Web sites. Possibly, you could use a tool such as  the Zotero plugin to keep track of citations and Web pages and other documents and then import the day’s library into the hard drive. Selection would, of course, be taking place, and documents would be purposefully included and omitted. I think there is no way around that, unless you are an institution that archives everything that goes through its servers (i.e., the White House).

The archive would have to be dark to preserve the privacy of the individuals participating and also to preserve ownership of their research ideas. If we are preserving the experience and context as well as the data itself, while identity would not have to be associated with an individual’s collection, each individual collection would need to remain in tact or be able to be reconstituted through coding or metadata. At some point, the libraries would open the archive to the searching of raw data–research that allowed analysis while not revealing anything about the specific work of the participants. Eventually, the whole archive could be opened up–by this time it would have migrated several times,  been backed up in multiple places, coded and described so that historians of the future would have not only a database of digital objects, but an understanding of the time and circumstances under which the documents were used and the motivations behind why the preservation took place at all.

This idea is a research project in itself as well as a collection building project. It may be a good digital humanities project that would incorporate the skills of the scholar, the technologist, and the librarian.

What Ho! Red Herring–an undisciplined ramble

Red Herring 
by Laurel Russwurm

Used under a Creative Commons Attribution license

I don’t really want to write about Jeeves and Wooster but I did want to say What Ho! And I do enjoy reading P.G. Wodehouse. Bertie is so well meaning and clueless (and privileged) and Jeeves is so smooth and wiley (not dishonest but definitely an Odysseus type trickster. He would be a favorite of Athena). Oh, the foibles of the depleted upper classes and the highly intelligent servant class. Jeeves reads “improving books,” in his spare time while Bertie and his undisciplined friends read the popular fiction of the day and sing the latest tunes. At least Bertie can play piano! Jeeves is a gentleman’s gentleman, and is as smooth as silk. Wodehouse knows how to create and paint a character. I love the description of Jeeves “shimmering” into a room. You can really picture that can’t you? When Jeeves first takes Bertie on as his client, he establishes himself firmly in the Wooster household by mixing Bertie a restorative cocktail. Jeeves knows what Bertie wants before Bertie thinks to ask, and indeed, offers more guidance than Bertie might wish. I would feel awkward with a servant, but if there were such a person as glimmering and acute as Jeeves taking care of the complicated details of life before the knots became to tight to untie and then cheerfully made sure your collars were ironed before you knew they were wrinkled … not to mention concocting a stimulating beverage now and then … well, that would be something one could appreciate. Which reminds me of one of my favorite nursery rhymes: “If wishes were horses beggars would ride, if watches were radishes we all would tell time.”

That’s my favorite when I’m wishing otherwise it is “Boys and Girls Come out to Play/The moon doth shine as bright as day./Leave your supper and leave your sleep/And come with your playfellows into the street./Come with a whoop and come with a call/Come with a goodwill or not at all.” This nursery rhyme evokes such freedom and spontaneity, a little saturnalia, where the children are in charge and the adults are taken down a notch. My own children were much older before they were leaving their supper and leaving their sleep to go out into the night. And even then, I’d set my alarm for 11:00 or midnight so that I could make sure they were home. When they were little, I didn’t let them go out in the backyard without me. In my childhood, I spent a lot more time roaming and playing even growing up in a city. My mother had a general idea of where we were. My two children grew up in rural Iowa and I was a working mother. But, when I was home, they were rarely out of my site, and they didn’t wander. They are both studying overseas now.

The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea in a beautiful pea green boat. From the Owl and the Pussy-cat by Edwin Lear

What ho! What does all of that have to do with Thinking Digitally? It was more doing digitally. I verified my nursery rhymes on the Web, I wrote all my thoughts into this digital writing pad. I found the metaphorical image of my two children bravely heading out to sea on the Web. And now, in order to get on the other side of that image, I am typing on the code side hoping that I haven’t misplaced my image. And I haven’t!

Beginning to think Microsoft Office Clip Art office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/ It is a hot day to be thinking. At 9:33 pm it is 92 degrees and humid. As I took the trolley home, I planned out my evening. First get out of the clothes I’ve been wearing all day, second, take care of the cat, and third […]