Working with a history prof last year, we built a terrific blended course on the history of American technology from the Colonial era to the present. An important part of the course content was video / film, and some of that simply isn’t available CC. Case in point, the scene in “Strategic Air Command” where Henry Morgan gives Jimmy Stewart a tour of the B-36 bomber (in 1955, the main intercontinental bomber). In the space of a few minutes, it provides a snapshot of the height of military technology *and* sets it in the context of the MAD doctrine and the Cold War in general – and it’s a historical document in and of itself. IOW, it’s absolutely perfect.

The flip side of the issue is faculty who don’t want to share what they’ve created. I spoke with an instructor recently who has some one-of-a kind microscope images that were very difficult to obtain. Expensive, fiddly equipment and shy micro-organisms. He doesn’t want to put them on the web because other people might use them.

D’Arcy Norman makes an interesting observation how institutions take on exceptional efforts to keep content such as class slides and video recordings shut away from the public because the slides would violate some copyrights and not necessarily …

An interesting post came across a month ago regarding just how many types of searches in Google do not have an option to restrict by license. http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-01-04-n81.html

The idea that, in order to make things sharable down the line, professors ought to invest time and energy into taking the third course of action seems unrealistic to me in light of the real-world constraints and rewards that govern most faculty members’ daily lives and work. You get no points in the tenure process (at least not at any institution I know of) for putting those in extra hours required just so someone else can freely take advantage of your work. The “spark” that Alan Levine speaks of above may not be enough to motivate someone to sacrifice the time and energy to do something else that’ll actually count towards tenure.

I realize you’re not suggesting putting all the onus on the individual professor, but on the other hand, at most schools, realistically, that’s who’s going to end up doing the legwork here, I suspect. Of course, I’m in the U.S. and may have a slightly different perspective from many others.

Anyhow, I wish it weren’t so, and I don’t mean to sound like a nay-sayer. I guess my point is that in the contexts I’m most familiar with, this would require a large-scale cultural change before it would really be practicable.