Open educational content – possible future prediction by David Wiley

David has published an intriguing draft of a possible book chapter, written in the form of a historical review at a future date, looking at the 2005 – 2010 OpenCourseWars. As one commenter already pointed out, this form of fictive, entertaining writing probably helps to communicate the difficult issues of the Creative Commons NC (Non-Commercial) clause better than any number of scientific publications. The main message (which I agree with fully) is that NC is bad – it does not work, it is ambiguous, and problematic. For educational content, the SA (Share-Alike) clause provides enough protection to content authors.
This is the stance that our research group has taken when we’ve designed and developed the LeMill system for finding, authoring and sharing learning resources. We use CC BY-SA exclusively, and as part of the EU-wide consortium involved in the CALIBRATE project are giving our best effort to helping both teachers and educational policy makers in the EU understand this issue. And we’re having some success, I’d say. At least the consortium is still allowing us to proceed with the development of our fully free and open collaborative authoring system with the CC BY-SA license enforced, and we’re actually getting excellent reviews from both official and unofficial sources. (Hmm, now I’m thinking I should have posted this in our group’s blog, since I got so involved with our work. Oh well…)
I have just one question to David: I find it odd that I cannot see any license information on your blog or in your writings section, considering the huge contributions you’ve made in the field of open licenses. I’d like to paste your chapter draft into LeMill, and possibly translate it to Finnish. But can I do that? I see no license information, so I assume you’re using POC (plain-old-copyright), and therefore my possibilities for using this excellent article to educate others on the threat of NC are quite limited. If I’m wrong, please let me know.
Update: Well, David replied quite quickly (kudos to David’s ability to follow the blogosphere) and his Creative Commons plugin had just been broken with the WordPress upgrade, but was quickly restored. And of course the article as well as other David’s writing are licensed under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license.