Schoolnet Namibia wows Walvis Bay

Filed under: Featured Content — Heather Ford @ 9:46 am

gilI’ve just returned to Windhoek from an incredible trip to Walvis Bay with Schoolnet Namibia. Executive Director, Joris Komen and three technicians, Helena, Pelinawa and Alexis were demonstrating the model that has won them awards around the world – especially for the great free and open source software policies that they have spearheaded in Namibia.

I am with a group of representatives from Tajikistan who are here trying to learn from the Schoolnet experience as they begin to set up a similar initiative in central Asia. We couldn’t have had a better learning experience, visiting two vastly different schools and learning first hand the kinds of challenges that are faced by the incredible staff of this initiative.

We started off at Duneside High, a semi-private school that was hosting a 3 day educational publishing “expo” in their hall. Schoolnet Namibia had been invited to show off their technology, setting up a small 5 station LAN which was humming constantly with kids from the primary school on Tuesday and Wednesday this week.

The expo was a facinating display of old meeting new technology. The traditional publishers had set up their stands, selling their paper wares – some beautiful, most over-priced – while Schoolnet set up their LAN to access millions of books and info gems from around the world.

gilMany reeled in horror and disbelief when Joris swung by to tell them about the end of copyright as we know it, and the gift of free and open source and Creative Commons to schools in Namibia. I couldn’t help thinking that this is how many revolutionaries are received – especially in the small dorpies where change is slow to arrive.

We left the expo after two days, and took the computers (refurbished processors, servers and components new) to Kuisebmond High, a school in a starkly disadvantaged area in town. The teachers were thrilled to receive the LAN with free Internet access from Schoolnet Namibia – and about 12 learners sat with the technicians until about 8pm that night, learning how this new technology worked, taking notes and chatting curiously and furiously to us about the world ‘outside’.

The Schoolnet LAN was set up in the school’s ‘resource centre’ which houses a measly amount of books – many of which are old and outdated texts.

gil One book I picked up, ‘complete guide’ to health, was published in 1923 with pretty hilarious descriptions of ‘insanity’ and ‘mental disease’ – I was afraid that any student would take advice from the book!

By the end of our visit, Joris and I were talking excitedly about a project to develop Creative Commons-licensed content for Schoolnet Namibia networks. This is definitely being seen as the ‘missing link’ in the school connectivity projects that I’ve visited – and with the HIV/AIDs pandemic impacting critically on the numbers of teachers in Africa, it will become increasingly important to develop learner-driven educational solutions in the future.

See this space for more in the future!

Another reason why we need a balanced copyright curriculum

Filed under: General — Heather Ford @ 11:09 am

Nancy Willard from the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use has done some research into the harrowing intellectual property ‘lessons’ that have been including in the ‘I-Safe curriculum’ in the United States. I-Safe has apparently received $8.5 million dollars from the US Congress to produce an Internet safety curriculum for K-12
schools. They are now trying to get their curriculum into schools throughout the US. Don’t feel too comfortable – I know of similar messages being imparted on students in South Africa.
‘Here are just some of the things I have found:

From grade 5 curriculum:

“Intellectual property has value to its owner. The owner has control of what can be done with his or her intellectual property. So … It is wrong to copy or download articles, pictures, or other information from the Internet. When you download these items, the person who made them doesn’t get paid or get credit for their work, and you are stealing something that belongs to
someone else.”

From grade 7 curriculum

“Intellectual Property is a name used for copyrighted material or something that is intangible (you can’t touch it)

Examples are

1. An idea
2. Invention
3. Expression or literary expression
4. Unique name
5. Business method
6. Industrial process
7. Chemical formula
8. Computer program process
9. Presentation

For example, a unique name — no one else can take the name Disney and use it.”

Also in Grade 7 curriculum under a discussion on Plagiarism:

“Not only is it cheating, it is stealing. And there are possible consequences:

1. Fail the class
2. Fail the assignment
3. Suspension or expulsion from school
4. Could affect college eligibility
5. Lose your job
6. Get sued in court”

ccSA has sent a proposal onto the Shuttleworth Foundation to develop a balanced curriculum on copyright. Looks like this will become increasingly important.

Creative Commons in Namibia

Filed under: General — Heather Ford @ 10:31 am

I’m in Namibia this week talking to interested organisations about porting the Creative Commons license to the Namibian jurisdiction. If you know of anyone who I should speak to, let me know.

Creative Commons SA on SABC next month

Filed under: General — Heather Ford @ 5:40 am

Thanks to the awesome fellas from the Go Open television program for coming around yesterday to interview me about Creative Commons in SA. The interview will be featured in the ‘intellectual property rights’ program being broadcast a few weeks after the show starts in late November. Some pretty incredible people are being interviewed by the crew – including Richard Stallman, Mark Shuttleworth, the Jo’bloggers and the folks from the HP iCommunity project. Will send details closer to the time.

Win a Creative Commons Tshirt

Filed under: General — Heather Ford @ 4:47 am

We will be launching a largely online magazine related to Creative Commons and copyright issues in southern Africa next month. Please comment on this post with your vote for one of the titles below – or suggestion something new. We’ll draw a random post and send that person one of the cool Creative Commons Tshirts that have just arrived from San Francisco.

Free Culture Southern Africa
New Copyright
CopyDev
Innovate
Copyshare
Innovation Commons
Copy Commons

SL magazine publishes cool cc article

Filed under: General — Heather Ford @ 4:27 am

Entitled, ‘Steal this CD’, the article is an awesome read – not because I wrote it, but because of the amazing things that Rebecca Kahn and Natalie Dixon did with it. From the first para:

‘The recording and publishing industry has been crying wolf for years, telling us that the internet is killing music – that by copying it, we’re keeping all those poor little record execs and rock stars on the breadline. Well, just as the photcopier didn’t kill publishing and the VCR didn’t kill the movie industry, the internet hasn’t killed anything off yet. Through an organisation called Creative Commons, the Beastie Boys and other top musicians are starting to bypass record companies, making their music available to the public to copy freely online, remix or be sampled by other artists for use in their own new recrdings. Welcome to the end of copyright as we know it.’

I especially love the awesome graphic that SL commissioned from magictorch.com. You guys rock!

Thank you for believing in this (very young) movement for South Africa.

Brand spanking new!

Filed under: General — Heather Ford @ 5:14 am

Wow! Check out the Creative Commons site redesign – very, very cool. I especially like the prominence of icommons, and the ccSA page.

AIDS museum project thinks about copyright

Filed under: General — Heather Ford @ 8:59 am

I’ve just been to a very interesting seminar organised by the Perinatal HIV Research Unit (PHRU) and the South African History Archive (SAHA) to discuss the potential structure of an AIDS Museum and multi-media project in South Africa.

I suggested that using Creative Commons licenses for the archive’s content would be a good idea if the idea is to enhance the public nature of the archive and encourage greater interactivity among participants. But there are some serious questions around potential unexpected uses that may require the license being adapted.

Take this example. A person living with HIV/AIDS decides to donate their story to the museum because they feel that this would be a good contribution to the public’s knowledge of the disease. The museum uses the terms of a Creative Commons non-commercial license. But ‘non-commercial use’ may not be specific enough in such sensitive cases. Say someone found the pictures and decided to use them in a degrading music video, without understanding the reasons why the information is being made available.

Perhaps we need to provide more options that make ‘non-commercial purposes’ more specific. One idea could be to specify that information may only be re-used, copied and distributed if it is for the purpose of raising awareness around the many facets of HIV/AIDS. And that information needs to be presented in a way that ‘does no harm’ to the people involved.

What do you think?

Could LIO use Creative Commons licenses?

Filed under: General — Heather Ford @ 7:36 am

The latest on the Laugh It Off case is that the company has filed papers with the Constitutional Court. My question to ccSA’s resident legal guru, Christiaan Bester, is this: ‘Since LIO lost their case on the basis that they were using their commentary for financial gain, could they release the designs under a Creative Commons non-commercial license, enabling people to download the designs from the Internet and make their own Tshirts?’

I asked him this because of Hellkom’s decision (due to legal advice) to allow people to make their own Tshirts using the designs hosted on the site. I presume that they wouldn’t be liable since they were expressing themselves without thought for commercial gain. This is what Christiaan had to say:

‘The Supreme Court of Appeal in Laugh-it-Off did not expressly say that commercial parody is impermissible under our law. Judge Harms did however take the commerciality into consideration as one of the factors that led him to conclude that trademark infringement had taken place. In this respect, he referred to the ‘predatory intent’of Laugh it Off in making money from their use of SAB’s trademarks. He referred to a French case where Greenpeace had parodied an oil company’s trademark. Greenpeace, did not do so for commercial gain, but as a kind of ecological protest.

Accordingly, Laugh-it-Off may distribute its T-shirts for free under a non-commercial licence, but the terms will have to be extremely narrow so that any form of financial gain from such distribution is completely proscribed.

This does not mean Judge Harms was correct in his assessment of the case. We know that in the United States, commercial parody is allowed and receives constitutional protection. The judge was referred to these cases but was clearly not persuaded. The Constitutional Court will have to decide on this question, but until the case comes up for hearing in the next year or so, the judgment of the Supreme Court of Appeal stands as the proper and binding interpretation of the law.’

At least there is something that can be done to protect the expressions if they lose the case. We hope that it doesn’t come to this. But there you go.

Other posts on this case can be found here, here and here.

Swahili IT glossary uses cc licenses

Filed under: General — Heather Ford @ 7:38 am

What a wonderful project! I just heard from Alberto Escudero who is working on a Swahili IT glossary in Tanzania licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license. The content is great, but the methodology is even better, engaging a wide range of Kiswahili experts, computer scientists and now, volunteers in developing tech terms for the local community. This advice to the volunteer ‘graders’ of the glossary is particularly interesting:

‘We are aware that words can sound very funny when you are not used to them – this is normal. Just try to grade the words as if they are good options to “adapt” the English to Kiswahili. Problably the first time that someone used the word “mouse” in the computer sense many people also smiled at him or her. Kiswahili has a rich grammar that allows the creation of new terms in different ways that the English does. Most of Kiswahili speakers are not aware of that, finding the correspondent IT terms in Kiswahili is not more difficult that in any other language.’

Great work, klnX!

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