As our cohort has been reading Martin Weller’s book 25 Years of Ed Tech we’ve discovered that there is a complex web of individuals, theories, ideas, and experiments which have contributed to the educational technologies and the pedagogies we leverage while teaching online. One of these individuals is Lawrence Lessig, an American Law professor and founder of the Creative Commons licensing structure. Creative Commons would go on to become the most common license allowing educational resources to be shared and re-used within the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement (Weller, 2020, p. 78 – 79). Lessig and his colleagues developed the Creative Commons structure in reaction to evolving copyright law in the United States in the late 90s and early 2000s which they saw as unnecessarily (and unconstitutionally) restrictive. First published in 2002 and continuing to evolve, Creative Commons licenses provide creators the ability to work within copyright law but independently set the terms of how and if they want their work to be able to be shared, profited from, and remixed in the future (1.1 The Story of Creative Commons, n.d.). To understand the impact of Creative Commons we only need to look at the readings we have already reviewed as part of our Zero Textbook Cost graduate program and notice Creative Commons licenses attributed to many of them, meaning those authors have actively chosen to set the terms of how their works can be re-used in programs such as ours.
If you would like to learn more about how to assign a Creative Commons license to your own work and assign how and if your work can be shared or re-used, visit the CC License Chooser tool (in beta testing) at: https://chooser-beta.creativecommons.org/.
To learn more about Lawrence Lessig:
- Follow him here on Twitter (or-whatever-we-call-it-now)
- Visit his website
- Listen to this interview reflecting on Creative Commons’ 20th anniversary (2021)
References
1.1 The Story of Creative Commons: Creative Commons Certificate for Educators, Academic Librarians and GLAM. (n.d.). https://certificates.creativecommons.org/cccertedu/chapter/1-1-the-story-of-creative-commons
Junnell, R., & Ottis Brown, G. (2022). Twenty Years of Creative Commons (in Sixty Seconds) [Video]. https://www.flickr.com/photos/creativecommons/52543574218/
Weller, M. (2020, February). 25 Years of Ed Tech. AU Press—Digital Publications. https://read.aupress.ca/projects/25-years-of-ed-tech