Thing #23: More than Commonly Creative

From the xkcd.com comic 1337: Part 3* 

I have to admit that I only had a vague idea of what Creative Commons licensing was before taking this class.  I had seen it attributed on various websites I visit, particularly by some of my favorite webcomic authors/artists, such as the xkcd comic above, which uses a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 Generic license).  As a Computer Science major, though, I am very familiar with open source licensing, like the General Public License (GPL) for Unix/Linux systems, and Creative Commons is similar.

Creative Commons provides teachers a lot of flexibility about how they want to share resources, whether "original" or "remixed" creations based on other's shared works.  For example, say I created a series of online tutorials on using programming skills to teach certain math concepts.  Under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) license, I allow other teachers (and anyone else) to use and even create derivative works from my tutorials, so long as they don't use it for commercial purposes and remember to attribute me.

Oh, I almost forgot!  The following statements, under the "Credits" portion of the Learning 2.0 - 23 Things for Teachers blog, describes how it is based on the work of others:

Learning 2.0 - 23 Things for Teachers is based on Learning 2.0 - 23 Things, a staff development program for the Mesquite Independent School District. That program was based on the Learning 2.0 program that was designed by Helene Blowers and adapted by the California School Library Association and others. Content and style for Learning 2.0 - 23 Things for Teachers has been borrowed and duplicated with permission, under a Creative Commons License.

 *Warning: xkcd.com occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).