[Opensource] SmartCopying

[Roland Gesthuizen]

I was interested in seeing some good information for teachers and students
about the creative commons licensing and resources on the Smartcopying
website.

http://www.smartcopying.edu.au

This is certainly an improvement from a few years ago when I asked this
question of the Australian Copyright Council. At the time I was rather
disappointed to by their response 'of no interest'. After revisiting their
website, I was initially delighted to see that although they now freely
acknowledge the existence of the creative commons licencing model,
their analysis
seems to be overly cautious and
dismissive<http://www.copyright.org.au/pdf/acc/infosheets_pdf/g094.htm/?searchterm=creative%20commons>.
It is almost if they some are in denial of its successful use by different
licences by Indi musicians, Open Source software developers or the work by
Wikipedia.

Educators have an obligation to inform and educate our students and we need
to embrace the brave new territories of the Internet whilst respecting local
laws. Many schools now make considerable use of open source software and
creative commons resources downloaded from the Internet or directly authored
by teachers then allocated a creative commons licence to correctly
attribute, modify and share.

Only when we are armed with the refreshing and helpful information on your
website, we are in a much better position teach our students about copyright
issues and direct them towards appropriate and freely available resources
and software. :-)

-- 
Roland Gesthuizen - ICT Coordinator - Westall Secondary College
http://www.westallsc.vic.edu.au

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change
the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has." --Margaret Mead
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