Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Education is a public good - not a commercial activity!

The purpose of this post is to clarify that the NC (noncommercial) element in the IJPE Creative Commons license is NOT intended to inhibit educational use. Learners and educators at any level, anywhere, are free to use this blog in teaching and learning.

The reason that I am posting about this is that it has come to my attention that there are jurisdictions where education is viewed as a commercial activity. From my perspective, this should be corrected and I hope it will in time, but in the meantime I am looking for the best way to say what my intentions are with respect to sharing of my work.

On a related note, again I think this should be obvious and not need to be stated, if I have posted something for access by anyone on the web and not taken any action to restrict crawlers, etc., of course I am allowing crawling and data mining. Whether taking actual content from my blog to post elsewhere and sell ads that make it appear as I approve the ads is a different story. If you know anyone who is doing this and selling ads to companies with practices to society or the environment, let me know so that I can take action to stop them. But if you are working hard for the social good or the environment and wish to do this, go for it!

If I am okay with educational uses and crawling, one might ask, why the NC? What I am trying to get at is that if you are a student or teacher, I am happy to share my work with you with very minimal restrictions. But if you are a for-profit business selling packages of services to schools, you do not have permission to include my work for free, so please get in touch with me to discuss appropriate royalties.