Creative Commons 4 Educators

Hi Juanan and Mary,
Nice to meet both of you. I am currently the Director of Technology for a small school district in New York State, about 1 hour north of Manhattan. In addition, I work with several regional agencies to support instructional technology initiatives. Lately I have been receiving a lot of requests to talk about how to use the creative commons to support the design of online courses, and how teachers can use it in their classrooms.

Looking forward to learning with you,

Andrea Tejedor

Hi everyone. Lots of names to put here, so I'm simply using everyone at this point. :) It's interesting to hear about the diversity of nations we come from, and the types of work each of you do.

I'm from Scottsdale, Arizona in the U.S. I'm not actually in the field of education currently, by trade, but maybe someday. Who knows? It peaks my interest. I'm CEO of a small web development company, and I use open source software, etc., to deploy solutions for a variety of businesses, institutions and people.

One can never stop learning. CEOs/entrepreneurs are often encouraged to step outside of their field of expertise to find fresh ways of doing things, and that's what this is about for me. I do teach others in non-institutional settings quite often, and look forward to seeing if anything we learn or share here can be incorporated into the work my company does, and see what I can contribute as well. Perhaps what I learn here can be applied someday to an educational institution that may become a client. Possibilities.

This looks to be an interesting course, and this is my first foray into the P2PU idea as well. I just stumbled on it a couple of days ago. Very cool.:) Nice to meet all of you.

Jeffrey

Hi everyone,

I teach Physical Education. For some time I have been researching educational technologies and try to use them in my school, helping other teachers and encouraging students to interact with these new tools. I'm Brazilian, from Rio de Janeiro.

My intention is to learn more about creative commons and how to apply this knowledge in the educational process.
This is my first course in P2PU.

It's really cool to interact with you and hope to collaborate in the construction of collective knowledge.

Greetings and good course for us!
Marco.

Hi all

I'm the coordinator for the course.

Excellent to see so much activity, and apologies for the lack of a welcome from me - a technical issue has stopped me from starting a thread on the site. So I spent all day yesterday trying to get things started, but was unable to!

But you seem to have solved the problem by starting the discussion yourself (thanks Juanan). So thanks for your diligence.

Welcome everyone to the first round of the Creative Commons for Educators course on p2pu. I don't know how many of you have undertaken a p2pu course before, but the most important part of the course is conversation with your peers. And that's what this week is all about.

So I'd like to start by requesting that everyone introduce themselves - though you seem to be doing a fairly good job of that on your own. Just let us all know who you are, where you are, and why you're interested in the course.

You can find my bio here: http://p2pu.org/users/jessica-coates - but basically I'm the former project manager of Creative Commons Australia, and a former teacher/academic at Queensland University of Technology (small world, hey, Mary?). I'm currently working in the broadcasting sector in Sydney, but I still have a great love of CC, and so have agreed to run this course to stay involved.

Based on the introduction information you provide, I'll allocate your assignment groups in the next few days, trying to group like-interested people. These are the groups that you will collaborate with to answer the three case study assignments that make up the assessment for the course.

In the meantime, I suggest you take some time to get to know each other and the p2pu site, and in particular the course materials here: http://p2pu.org/general/node/13894/document/14517.

Now is a good time to look at the recommended reading for the course - you can find it here: http://p2pu.org/general/node/13894/document/14517.

It's also a good idea to get started on the reading for the first Case Study in particular - see here: http://p2pu.org/general/node/13894/document/14516. It's due on 7 February (ie in under a fortnight) so you'll only have a week or so to get the answer together once you have your groups. But don't start answering the questions until you have your group, just start reading and thinking.

In a short while I'll also post a little introductory task for everyone to do as an individual - it's very simple, but will give everyone a chance to get thinking about the issues, and become familiar with CC and the p2pu system.

That's all I can think of for the time being. If anyone has any questions, let me know. Otherwise, let the conversation continue!

Jessica

Hello everyone,

I have just started teaching fifth grade at a public school south of Chicago. I do not have specialized training in technology but have quickly gained respect for my understanding of it and am looking forward to taking several groups of students throughout the state to show it off in the next couple of months. The school also received a grant for this school year, which has provided my classroom with an interactive whiteboard and each of my students with a dedicated netbook. We end up with a lot of screen time everyday.

While earning my teaching degree, I discovered the open source technology community and soon thereafter the Creative Commons movements. I am thoroughly impressed with the community and professionalism, and look forward to contributing more in the future. In addition to my fifth graders, I will be presenting about the advantages of open source technology, Creative Commons licensing and free culture to a group of young artist/entrepreneurs, and hope to start teaching other teachers about the same before long.

This is my first experience with P2PU, but only because I have kept missing the registration dates. I am extremely excited to learn on this platform and with all of you.

Jon

Hello everyone,

I am Vivek , a prof. from India, Teaching Entrepreneurship and Economics in a top Indian college, at a place called Chandigarh. I have taught for over 20 years and want to learn so that i can still remain relevant to the young students i address. I am not teaching technology, but am interested in learning about ICT. I have used ICT tools for teaching and feel they can contribute in my mission of "DEMOCRATIZING EDUCATION" i.e. where learning is not bound by constraints of incomes, distances, nationality ....

Vivek

Hello, All,
I'm a recently retired software development manager and university professor. Canada is the current home base. I have been doing research over the last couple years with colleagues at a few universities in North America, Europe, Africa and Australia on faculty and student beliefs, attitudes and intentions surrounding open courseware and open educational resources in general. The more I can learn about examples of CC licensing, the better, since it is central to a lot of OER generation and use. I'll be in Cuenca, Ecuador the month of February. We'll see how the network there is. Nice to meet all of you,

Joseph

Hi everyone,
I am the Secondary School librarian in an international school in Rome, Italy. I also teach Grade 6 computers. I am very interested in learning about Creative Commons and how to promote it as an alternative to our students. I find they really do not question copyright of anything they find on the internet. Am a complete newbie so please bear with me.

I work for the Department of the Army in the Technology Integration Branch at Fort Lee, Virginia. We develop in-house distributed learning computer and web-based courseware and training products; and virtual and gaming training simulations. Within the gaming realm, we utilize a lot of COTS (Commercial Off the Shelf) gaming systems. I look forward to learning a lot from everyone.

-David Garrison

Hi all. Sorry for such a late post on this. I edit a wide range of digital education resources in Melbourne, Australia, with one of the other people doing this course. Like many people in my workplace, I am keen to find out how teachers and students can be made more aware of CC-licensed materials in a way that is genuinely attractive and useful to them (ie, won't glaze their eyes over). It'd be good to bolster awareness of how they might also share materials that they create. I have a huge amount to learn myself, so am looking forward to this course. I don't work on Fridays, so will not be posting then.