Creative Commons help from New Zealand

Our close neighbours from New Zealand have been busy producing some fine resources to help us all teach the fundamental understandings of how Creative Commons licenses work.

This terrific little video was made by Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand, with support from InternetNZ, and is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand licence. It’s a project of the Royal Society of New Zealand and was produced by Mohawk Media. I’ll definitely be using it with classes to help them understand why we should be thinking about Creative Commons licensing of work we use and produce. It’s a damn sight better than me barking on!

Creative Commons Kiwi from CreativeCommons AotearoaNZ on Vimeo.

Another very handy resource comes from Derek Wenmoth, CORE Education’s Director of eLearning. (You’ll have to visit the link; it won’t embed here) Derek had the opportunity to interview Lawrence Lessig, one of the founders of the Creative Commons organisation. Lawrence explains why educators and students should be thinking about usage rights and mentions how search engines like Google and Bing don’t make it easy to search for Creative Commons material. It’s one of my most vocal criticisms of those search engines too – surely the option to find CC material should be accessible from their front pages, and not hidden in advanced search options.

Thanks very much to our friends from New Zealand for providing us with resources we can use in our programs.