By dan on 29 October 2009 under creative commons, the internet
Stanford Engineering Everywhere is an online portal offering ten courses from Stanford’s School of Engineering— including the three-course introductory sequence in Computer Science— free of charge.
Note: SEE courses cannot be taken for credit and do not include access to Stanford-restricted computers, libraries, or services. Content may not include all the material used in the campus offering and cannot be used for commercial purposes.
I’ve been taking a look at the Programming Methodology Course, the first of the CS classes offered through SEE. So far I have spent most of my time watching YouTube videos of the lectures, which I think are very good. There are also links to software packages and course assignments, for homework.
In the internet age, we create our own resumes. What would happen if programs, like those offered at SEE, were put on a resume even though they were not taken for credit? I mean, just because a class was not taken for credit doesn’t necessarily mean that it does not count for Educational Experience, right?
By dan on 15 April 2009 under creative commons, story
here is a link to a “segment of a Colbert Report interview with Lessig, in which Colbert purports to forbid people to remix the interview.”
After you listen to the interview, check out some of the links under “Samples are used in” on the bottom right of the page. That’s where you will find the different ways people have remixed the interview.
A video of the same interview was removed from youtube…
By dan on 23 July 2008 under creative commons, sound, the internet
The Free Sound Project functions as an online repository of sounds licensed under the curious and lesser known Creative Commons Sampling Plus! License. There is a good mixture of both straight field recordings and processed sounds. Under the terms of the sampling license, there are also multiple versions of many of the files which different members of The Project have tweaked and offered back up.
At the time of this post the site currently has 53557 audio files. That’s a lot. There are a couple of different ways to sift through all of that information: different searches for people on the look out (hear out?) for specific sounds and automatically generated lists like “Most popular files” and “Highest rated sounds” for general browsing.
I’ve always had this picture in my mind when it comes to places that have vast quantities of information and material like Free Sound. I envision most of the available good content lying dormant and collecting dust. Sure, new content is always featured in a ‘newly uploaded’ list. Sure, high ranking content is featured in a ‘high ranking’ list. What about the other stuff that hasn’t made those lists? Who has the time to go through every page of an archive of this size?
Fine, maybe all 53557 audio files of Free Sound do not need to be utilized at every minute of every day. Maybe the site serves its purpose and that’s it. More on that later.
At this point, I would like to draw attention to the “random sample” link on the lower left side of the main page of The Free Sound Project. This link is a nice feature and allows for a slight churn of content.
Project Idea: Click that “random sample” link and make something out of what you find. Beware, it may be some birds chirping, chant music, or someone’s grandfather snoring.
By dan on 27 April 2008 under creative commons, sound, the internet
The following is a quote from ccmixer, a community music remixing site featuring remixes and samples licensed under Creative Commons licenses. This snippet works as a fine English translation of the type of contest rules (legal contracts) that typically accompany legal remixes of material under copywrite.
Most sampling or mash-up contests on the Internet stipulate that you will never own the samples you use in the contest and that after the contest is run you forgo your rights even to the new song you created.
After the contest has been judged, all entries that are not commercially published are essentially useless because rights to the song are given up upon entry and access to files. Typically in these contests there is one winner who has the chance to get the remix published alongside the original track, whether that be on vinyl or on iTunes. Every other contest entry, whether that be 5 or 5,000, belongs to whoever is issuing the competition and are never released.
In using material featured at remixing sites like ccmixer, the products of the material can be used in many other ways, provided that it is for noncommercial purposes. You could, for example, create a remix and enter it into a contest, and then feature the remix on your website or play it on your internet radio station.
So there are alternatives. Remix culture does not have to be a stark white wall. One downside to the creative commons direction, however, has to do with why remixes are desirable in the first place. It’s nice to be able to identify a remix on first listen and to know what is being remixed. This would be an unlikely occurrence with CC material because it doesn’t have the same sort of airplay that other music does. The stuff people know about and would be able to identify is protected by 10,000 armies.
image: ©2006 morguefile.com
