Documentation:TWP2015/Activities/week1

Choose a license for your site and explain in a blog post

Since WordPress allows for teaching and learning on the open web, we'd like you to consider choosing an open license for the materials on your site, such as a Creative Commons license. There are other open licenses (e.g., see here for a list of licenses that the Open Knowledge Foundation says conform to their "Open Definition"), but Creative Commons licenses are very widely used and well known, so we will ask you to consider one of those.

Note: you can specify that only certain materials on your site are CC licensed, such as by excluding student work (if they haven't agreed to have their work CC licensed). By choosing a license you are not necessarily saying that everything on your site must be licensed in that way.

About the different Creative Commons licenses

Creative Commons has several options for licenses, each one allowing others to do certain activities without directly asking your permission.

This page on the Creative Commons website has basic information about each of the licenses: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/

If you want to go a bit deeper, you can take a look at:

• The University of British Columbia's information page on Creative Commons:
• This short "course" on understanding Creative Commons Licenses from Peer 2 Peer University: https://p2pu.org/en/groups/get-cc-savvy

Choosing a CC license

If you're ready to choose a license, you can use the Creative Commons license chooser: http://creativecommons.org/choose/

• This not only provides you with a nice code to put into your site to make it clear what the license is, it also offers you a way to add metadata to the code that is useful when others are searching for CC-licensed content!

Putting the license on your site

What should the notice of your license look like?

You can simply have a line of text that reads something like the following (you can of course leave out the exception clause):

• "All content on this site, with the exception of [xxxxxx], is licensed CC BY 4.0" -- you should put a link to the license terms themselves in the notice, as done here.
  

You could also add one of the Creative Commons "buttons" to make the license statement more immediately noticeable.

• Download the CC license buttons here: https://creativecommons.org/about/downloads/
  

See an example of such a notice on the bottom of the front page of this course web site: http://blogs.ubc.ca/phil102/

Where to put the license notice on your site

Put the notice on the front page of your site: If you have a static front page, you can put a notice of the license there, such as in the sample given above.

Put the notice on an "about" page on your site.

Put the notice in a footer widget section of your site, if the theme allows it:

• Go to "Appearance" on the dashboard, then "widgets" and add a text widget. You may need to format it using HTML to get it to look right.
  
  

Use a plugin, if you have the option of adding plugins to your site.

• The "open attribute" plugin is a very useful one for adding license notices--you can add one to your whole site, and/or to individual posts or pages. https://wordpress.org/plugins/openattribute-for-wordpress/

Writing a blog post and commenting on others' posts

Please write a post on your blog explaining which license you chose, and why (or, if you chose not to use a CC license, why not).
Then please comment on posts by at least two other people in the course. Just go to the blog hub, click on the title of the post, and add your comment on that person's blog.

Sharing your Big Question for the Week

As a way to share our inquiry process once per week you will be sharing a big question that you have about teaching, open pedagogy, or WordPress. The concept of big question is based on the essential questions. Discussed by Grant Wiggins in his Big Ideas site. The big question is a question that; "causes causes genuine and relevant inquiry into the big ideas and core content; provokes deep thought, lively discussion, sustained inquiry, and new understanding as well as more questions."

Consider the material, readings, and discussion during Week 1 of the course. What do you want to inquire more about? What do you want to ask the group? What is your big question?

Share your big question using Twitter and include the hastags include #quest with #TWP15 so that we can aggregate it on the site. Let's explore of the biq questions that come up during this course together.