Thing #23 Creative Commons

I had never heard of Creative Commons before we began the 23 "Things". It seems to go along with the concept of collaboration which is a big push not only in education but also the business world as well. For people who are not trying to "make a buck" on personal creations, this is the perfect way to work alongside others, helping each other out. Kind of like, "why re-invent the wheel?" Thank goodness the orginal "wheel" has been revised and improved on throughout history, so why not use the same concept when creating anything whether it is photos, music, written documents and many more things as well.

With Creative Commons people can easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want or if you want to look at it another way, with the restrictios they want to place upon it. I went to Flickr to look for some pictures with the Creative Commons license. I came across a group of pictures that had been entered into a contest to promote Creative Commons. All the pictures had the CC logo inserted into the picture. The picture that caught my eye was one of two small children in one sweatshirt, with both of their heads through the neck opening and one arm of each one coming out of each sleeve. On the front of the sweatshirt was the CC logo. What a creative picture to show what Creative Commons is all about.

I started looking at some of the comments about the picture and clicked on a link. It took me to a screencast of the mother of the 8-year old in the picture, walking through the steps he needed to follow in order to make a Powerpoint about his family. You could see him clicking on buttons as he created the Powerpoint. You could hear he and his mother talking about what he needed to do. She was questioning him about the picture he was inserting it into the Powerpoint and reminded him that he needed to include a portion of text next to the picture stating where he had found the picture. She proceeded to question him about Creative Commons and he explained clearly what it meant and why he needed to do it. If an 8-year old can understand and explain it, then I know that I should be able to grasp what it's all about!

As far as how librarians would use a Creative Commons License, anything you create and state conditions on how it can be used, could share pictures for research with students, collaborating on Powerpoints for teachers to edit in creating note-taking pages for research, webquests and much more. In fact, I created a webquest on exploring the on-line catalog for orientation this year. I guess I need to go back and apply for a CC license for that since it was posted on our library website. Also, I've already created a school wiki. Shoul I get a CC license for that and the handouts I've uploaded to the wiki? If anyone out there has any answers, I would appreciate any input.