New Creative Commons license chooser

If your kiddos are creating and publishing digital content at the rate mine are, you likely want to lead them to select a CC license to apply to those digital stories and posters and music videos and works of art.

Just as it’s important to teach about the value of using Creative Commons materials, we need to teach them to see themselves as serious players in the world of user-generated content.

And we need to teach them how to let others know how, as artists, they want or do not want their own work to be remixed or reused by others.

A new Creative Commons license chooser launched this week.  The very simple interface presents four boxes that update dynamically as users select options and complete attribution metadata.

After completing the form, users are presented with a suggested license, a choice of regular or compact size icons, and embed code for inserting their license on a web page.

The top of the page leads users to background information: considerations before licensing, how the licenses work and the option to choose public domain instead.

On the bottom of the page, users are offered led to options for sharing work with existing communities that enable Creative Commons licensing in the following formats:

• Images
• Audio
• Video
• Text

In the Creative Commons Blog, CC’s Jonathan Palecek, shared the need for rebuilding the tool:

The license chooser has been completely redesigned for greater clarity and ease of use. While the original license chooser was successful at simplifying the act of selecting a license and applying it to one’s work, its linear workflow resembled a registration process. Furthermore, as the tool had been extended numerous times, its interface became more and more cluttered.

On a related note, check out the winners of the recent video contest on Open Education Resources.  You may want to share some of these explanations of the OER movement with your faculty to encourage them to share and to help them discover some of the platforms supported by generous educators around the world.

Why Open Education Matters from Blink Tower on Vimeo.

Filed under: creative commons, student work