CC-licensed mag gets accredited by SFWA —

DF McCourt sez, "Just thought that you might be interested in knowing that Canadian Creative Commons magazine AE has been added to the list of qualified professional markets by the Science Fiction Writers of America." — Cory •

Jan Rubak has once again set out to create a fan-audiobook of my essays, reading aloud from my book Context as he did with my earlier collection, Content. He's a great reader, and he's uploaded half the book so far, with the rest promised soon. Here's an MP3 of his reading of "Think Like a Dandelion."

"Context" by Cory Doctorow : Jan Rubak : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive (Thanks, Jan!)

CC-licensed games —

Lisa sez, "Mob Rules Games is a small, indie-startup founded on the core idea that game developers and the community of players should work together as much as possible. All of their content will be licensed under the CC-licensed and all their software will be Open Source licensed under Go modified version of the BSD license." — Cory •

Wired.com has a new photo policy: "Beginning today, we’re releasing all Wired.com staff-produced photos under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC) license and making them available in high-res format on a newly launched public Flickr stream." They've commemorated the event by releasing 50 of their archival images under the same terms, including this fab Jim Merithew shot from The Toy and Action Figure Museum. Bravo!

Wired.com Goes Creative Commons: 50 Great Images That Are Now Yours

Blackboard, the ubiquitous, hedge-fund-backed classroom software found on campuses around the world, has just changed its billing structure to make it possible for schools to share their courseware without having to pay fees for members of the public who audit the course or download its materials.

This is a pretty substantial shift. As EFF co-founder Mitch Kapor said, "Architecture is politics," and when your campus runs on a service that is architecturally incapable of hosting an open course, by default it becomes a place where courses must be closed.

The last time I taught a course on a Blackboard campus, I found the product so cumbersome and walled off that I threw it out in favor of a mailing list, a wiki, and a Blogspot blog that the students all belonged to. It was slightly more work to set up (mostly because I had to manually add all the students to each of those services), but it gave me the flexibility I needed to teach the course I'd been asked to deliver.

Mr. Henderson said that in the past 18 to 24 months he has heard increasing requests from colleges officials to allow sharing. He said that he wanted to make the change sooner, but that it is easier for him to win the argument now that the company, which was publicly held, has been sold to a private-equity firm, Providence Equity Partners.

“This is something that is easier to do as a private company more easily than as a public company because the risk of being misunderstood by investors is less,” says Mr. Henderson. “The investor community was skeptical about that and worried” about an open policy, he says, adding that in the new ownership model, “we had to tell three people about that at Providence, who immediately got it.”

One key to Blackboard’s new “Share” feature is a partnership with Creative Commons, which offers licenses for free content. When professors choose to make their courses free, they will be presented with options to easily attach a Creative Commons license, something they otherwise would have to do manually.

In Victory for Open-Education Movement, Blackboard Embraces Sharing (Thanks, Dad!)

Jane from Creative Commons sez,

Today marks the official launch of the 2011 Creative Commons Annual Campaign! Please join us in powering the future of openness! This year, we are offering a limited teal edition of the CC "I love to share" t-shirt to everyone who donates $50 or more (until supplies run out). For those who donate $300 or more, in addition to the t-shirt, we are offering beautiful hard copy editions of The Power of Open, stories of creators sharing knowledge, art, and data using Creative Commons.

The world is experiencing an explosion of openness. From artists inviting creative collaboration to governments around the world requiring publicly funded works be available to everyone, the spirit and practice of sharing is gaining momentum and producing results. We post about these results frequently; subscribe to the CC newsletter for a distilled monthly rundown.

Creative Commons relies on donations to build and constantly improve the technical and legal tools that enable openness to flourish. The future of openness is bright, but ensuring that future requires urgent and sustained effort. CC is continuing to improve the usefulness of our licenses and helping even more artists, institutions and governments share their works. We are reaching a critical mass and need your support now more than ever.

You are the Power of Open: 2011 Creative Commons Annual Campaign (Thanks, Jane!)

Here's a great piece on Jonathan Worth, an English photographer who has embraced Creative Commons and who offers free, CC-licensed photography instruction.

The breadth of content and openness of the class is enough to make any online education junkie salivate. The class’s RSS feeds host audio-recorded lectures, class assignments and special discussions. Worth’s Fall course attracted over 10,000 visitors to its website from 1,632 cities in 107 countries... Thanks to some savvy networking, the class also gives access to some big names. The crowd-sourced list of photo books, with submissions from bandstand photographers Alec Soth, Gilles Peress, Joel Meyerowitz, Todd Hido and others had over 100,000 page views.

“I think Jonathan’s course experiments are fantastic,” says Professor David Campbell, member of the Centre for Advanced Photography Studies at Durham University. “He is probably the most creative teacher I know.”

After nearly 15 years as a successful commercial photographer specializing in portraiture (he’s photographed celebrities like Alan Moore, Colin Firth and Brett Easton-Ellis), Jonathan Worth gave up the advertising and editorial jobs, left New York, and returned to his native England to take up a part-time teaching gig at Coventry University.

Jonathan shot some portraits of me as part of a National Portrait Gallery project, and they're among my favorite photos of all time (check out his portrait of Alan Moore!).

Free Online Class Shakes Up Photo Education (Thanks, Jonathan!)

Here's a great mashup of a Larry Lessig riff on Thoreau and political transparency, mixed with a slow, soulful blues, to excellent effect. "Walden Pond Blues" was mixed by Admiral Bob, who performs the music under a CC-BY license.

Walden Pond Blues

MP3 Link

(Thanks, Blooflame!)

(Image: Lawrence Lessig, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from joi's photostream & Skip James, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from pappipearse's photostream))

Adam created UnMakers using the Creative-Commons-licensed text of my novel Makers. It opens with the final scene, and invites you to navigate the text that led up to it hypertextually, following character-based indexes to the text. He'd like it if you'd annotate and further link the text, which is in a wiki.