Creative Commons, a non-profit organization with the mission of bringing "balance, compromise, and moderation" to the nation's copyright system, has announced that it is launching a new division called CC Learn, which will extend the work Creative Commons has been doing to support open educational material and repositories—kindergarten through lifelong learning. This initiative is made possible by the support of the Hewlett Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. (For more information on Creative Commons and its mission, read this story from Information Today, Inc.'s NewsBreaks archives: Creative Commons Nurtures the Public Domain.)

CC Learn will be more focused on teaching materials, while the Creative Commons work on open access to the scholarly literature will remain part of the Scholar's Copyright project in the Science Commons division.

CC Learn's immediate goal is to work with those who already provide open educational resources to remove or mitigate barriers to combining or remixing content from different open collections. In other words, its 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," the announcement states.

Source: Creative Commons, www.creativecommons.org