Thanks to funding from the Hewlett and Macarthur Foundations, Creative Commons is launching a new division called CC Learn, which will be devoted to open educational material and repositories - kindergarten through lifelong learning.  CC Learn's goal is to break down the barriers - whether legal, technical or cultural - between different collections of open educational content.  Our goal is to make material more "interoperable," to speed up the virtuous cycle of use, experimentation and reuse, to spread the word about the value of open educational content, and to change the culture of repositories to one focused on "helping build a usable network of content worldwide" rather than "helping build the stuff on our site."   Please help us spread the news!  Second, we need an Executive Director with experience in education to run the new division.  The person would be located in San Francisco, working with the astounding CC staff. Details are here.   http://creativecommons.org/about/opportunities#ccl  Please pass this information along to the networks you are a part of and encourage qualified people to apply. 

 

This is a really exciting initiative.  Imagine a global network of open and free educational content, with curricula customized to different states or countries, with experimentation across multiple sites and multiple platforms, so that someone else can find things to do with my content that I never thought of...   Imagine bringing into the open educational content community hundreds of thousands of teachers, students and volunteers.  Imagine pursuing ease of discovery and use of educational material with the same ingenuity and dedication that we invest in making e-commerce systems work well or in allowing teenagers to flirt with each other on social networking sites..  Many of the pieces are in place, and there are great people working on the issue already,  but there is a lot to do.  Please help us by passing this along.  (And if you can help fund it or donate to support it, so much the better!)