I’m pleased to link to a First Monday article I wrote that focuses on motivations for creating derivative works. The article grew out of an earlier post I made (or maybe it was vice -versa). Special thanks to David Wiley for his advice and encouragement and to BYU’s department of Instructional Psychology and Technology for [...]

My trip to the Open Education Conference has allowed me to catch up on some blogging that I’ve been neglecting.
Something I’ve been thinking about is the law of diminishing returns. As you might remember from Econ 110, this law states that the more one gets of something the less valuable each additional unit may be. [...]

I really like Chris Anderson’s books Free and The Long Tail. For me there is a small paradox between the two that I have been wanting to write about for some time. Let’s look at this from the perspective of a book publisher.
This publisher has read The Long Tail and is aware that there is [...]

My advisor David Wiley is a guest blogger at the Chronicle this month and posted today about some of our research.  You can read the article here.

I recently finished the book Innovation Happens Elsewhere by Ron Goldman and Richard Gabriel (available as a free download at http://www.dreamsongs.com/IHE/). (Got to love people willing to share digital versions of their books).
The book is about using open source and getting smart people outside of your organization to help do your work. I’m just going [...]

I’ve been waiting until I had time to do an in-depth review of Free but I’m seeing that that time isn’t going to happen. So I’ll keep bloggin in bits on it. Two things I wanted to highlight.
1. An interesting experiment in which researchers sold two kinds of treats. Deluxe chocolates for 15 cents and [...]

I still remember reading this article and being fascinated with the concept of “free.” A lot of my doctoral work centers around the concept of “free” and I was hungry for information on the subject. As I was finishing the article I thought to myself, “This would make a great book. Maybe I should contact [...]

I just found something I thought was pretty cool!
On March 25, 2004, Lawrence Lessig released his book Free Culture with a Creative Commons license that allowed people to access the digital PDF version on the Internet for free. The license also allowed people to legally make derivatives of the work (Free Culture, 2004). The next [...]

One of the books that has really affected my thinking is Free Culture. In this book the author (Lawrence Lessig) points out that books have two lives He says,
“Here is an idea that we should more clearly recognize. Every bit of creative property goes through different ‘lives.’ In its first life, if the [page 113] [...]

One of the great things about Creative Commons licenses (in my opinion) is that many of them allow for derivative works to be created. Derivative works are extremely popular in common culture. For example many Walt Disney movies are derivative works of earlier fairy tales (e.g. Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty). Westside Story is a [...]