I was quite excited to find KitZu a few days back [via Dave Warlick. ] The brainchild of Hall Davidson, Kitzu provides digital kits for education which can include images, video, audio and (I assume) text—all in a convenient zipped format complete with source manifest.
We’ve been thinking about kits for a while. In fact, it was the concept of ‘openly-licensed content building blocks’ (kits?) that first got us thinking about starting Yiibu. One thing we specifically wanted to do was incorporate other people’s content into our own thereby increasing the value of the building block collection overall—especially if the collection was provided with a manifest. As a result, I spent quite a bit of time over the past few months scouring content repositories for specific types openly licensed content. Sadly, it was not an easy task.
A recent Creative Commons blog post mentioned there are now about 14 million links to Creative Commons licenses from pages on the internet. I have a PubSub feed that sends me links to posts that reference CC and it returns about 100 posts a day. Add to that my OurMedia feeds (about 300 posts a day,) and feeds linking to other types of open content (Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive etc.) and that’s a ton of openly licensed content. Dare I say…too much?
I can hear people screaming already. Open content is a fundamental freedom! We’ve worked hard to get here, how can there possibly be too much content?
So let me clarify. The problem is not lack of content. It’s findability—and more specifically, findability of relevant, useable stuff. Search for ‘Paris’ in the Creative Commons search utility to see what I mean . Google returns 778,000 results and Yahoo 223,000—the first several dozen of which are links to high traffic sites that mention Paris; not necessarily relevant reusable content (also not the most relevant search parameter but it’s the kind of search term a student might use.) Then there’s the Nutch search engine (on the same page) which allows you to specify images only. There I got slightly more manageable results—649 images. Then there’s Flickr—6873 results for one specific license (you have to search individually in each license category so it adds up quickly.) And as Flickr only offers a tag based search in the CC section, your search results are likely to contain everything from photos of vacationing couples having dinner, to photos of someone’s foot (in Paris.) And finally OurMedia, with 127 results which include something about Paris Hitlon along with footage from the Les Blogs conference in Paris.
So now imagine you’re a teacher wanting to quickly put together a bunch of relevant photos for students working on a project. Sure the students could search all by themselves (it’s good learning experience) but it could well be an exercise in frustration. (What’s better, a frustrated teacher or student? Hopefully neither.) Wesley worries about providing cookie cutter resources that will result in all student projects looking the same and I agree that’s a risk, but 30 students individually wasting 3-4 hours each looking for two useable, openly licensed photos of Paris (let alone something really arcane like a portrait of Marie Antoinette and the Bastille) is equally wasteful (especially with all this open content around.)
Funny thing is, I found both of those while making Allo Paris—along with 30-40 really nice, very openly licensed Flickr photos of common travel attractions in Paris. I have them in folders, they’re all labeled, I even know the license, author, and URI. Now what if someone else had access to my collection? What if collections were stored online in content repositories and collection lists were shared (say in OPML format.) And what if communities managed their lists to keep them relevant? (a la Wikipedia)
Wouldn’t that be more useful than those 14 million links (and counting…) that Lawrence Lessig was talking about?