Copyright and creative commons

I had the opportunity to interview Lawrence Lessig at the recent NetHui and ask him some questions relating specifically to how schools might think about the issue of creative commons licensing, and the practical steps they might take should they decide to go down that track. Thanks to my colleagues at CORE the video is now available on EdTalks.

The issue is not only about how schools might license materials they develop (both students and teachers), but also how they manage the access and use (re-use) of existing materials, such as when students want to incorporate images or text from the web into an assignment, or take several resources and create a 'mash-up' of their own.

With an increasing amount of this activity taking place in schools – and in students own homes etc. – it is important that schools begin thinking seriously about their approach to managing he use and re-use of third party materials – particularly now that it is so easy to search for and download material from the web. I thought the point Lawrence makes in the interview about the filtering in Google image search provides a useful insight into how we ought to be thinking about this into the future.