Teaching Tip: Using Creative Commons
June 3, 2014
The Creative Commons mission
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that, according to its mission statement, 鈥渄evelops, supports, and stewards legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation.鈥 What does that mean? Let鈥檚 say one day you notice someone reading a magazine and the back cover has an advertisement that features a picture of a duck that you yourself took over a year ago and posted to your flickr account. You鈥檙e both flattered and frustrated 鈥 someone liked your picture enough to steal it, but you鈥檙e not getting any credit for it. This is where CC can help you out.
Licenses
Creative Commons can apply six different license types to your work 鈥 whether it鈥檚 a picture of a duck, a scientific article or a blog post 鈥 that will show users across the Internet how they can or cannot share, modify, commodify or in any other way use your work.
Why use Creative Commons?
You may well ask yourself, 鈥淲hy would I bother sharing my work anyway? Isn鈥檛 it automatically copyrighted the moment I produce it?鈥 As accessibility becomes a growing consideration, more and more creators 鈥 academic and otherwise 鈥 are looking to find reliable ways to share their work. Beyond more altruistic motivation, a Creative Commons license on your work (like a blog post or photograph) encourages users to share your work (because they don鈥檛 have to fear copyright infringement) and to credit you (since that鈥檚 part of the CC licensing agreement). The licensing process is also incredibly easy and free. Once you understand what license you want, it takes a few seconds to get an embed code that will accompany the work it represents anywhere you store it online.
Go to iTeachU for more ways you can use Creative Commons: .
Teaching Tip by , instructional designer