Thing #23 - Creative Commons Copyright

With the easy availability of so many images and audio on Web 2.0 sites, I am very grateful that someone established Creative Commons. What a great idea to let authors of online resources decide ahead of time that they want to grant permission to share. This new type of copyright is very understandable, even for students. Since many of them are also creators of digital files, I think they would actually welcome the guidelines, since it will protect them and also require users to give them credit. It's a win/win situation.

Under the Credits on the Learning 2.0 site we have been using, there are attributions showing that the content was modified and adapted with approval. The license shows that there is permission to remix and to share as long as credit is given. It was fun looking at the original program and seeing how many other are also doing it.

As a school librarian, I could use this either on my personal sites, like a blog or podcast or anything that I choose to put on the Internet. As students put together digital presentations, I'd like to teach them about the Creative Commons License. At school they are currently blocked from using many of the sites that have video and audio that they could use, but hopefully some of the sites will be made available to them in the future.