The Intellectual Properties of Learning: Locke's Lost Commonwealth
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The project for this book is to read the educational implications of "intellectual property" that are to be found in the double meaning of property, as the word refers to an economic right and a quality of being. It will briefly visit the 17th century origins of this double concept of intellectual property (IP), with particular attention paid to John Locke (who provides the basis of IP as a personal possession as well as furthering the idea of a "commonwealth of learning" ) and the emergence of "open science." The argument will then proceed on two levels, educational and public, as it draws parallels between the way that students are taught to regard learning and the way in which a knowledge-based global economy treats learning. On the first level, that of the personal, the paper puts forward a critique of the common educational tendency to treat learning as a private good, in terms of personal asset management, which ultimately undermines the commonwealth of learning and the idea of knowledge as a public good. On the second level, that of the public sphere, the paper turns to the increasing privatization and capitalization of knowledge that is making inroads into the commonwealth of learning, particularly around publicly funded research and scholarship. The paper considers the prospects, finally, of ""open"" responses (e.g., open access, open source, etc.) to reasserting the vital role of the commonwealth, through new technologies of knowledge sharing, and it considers the educational policy implications of preparing a new generation of students who, as they are prepared to participate in knowledge-based economies, should also understand the implications of sustaining the commonwealth of learning.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | [ca. August 2008] |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Willinsky, John |
|---|
Subjects
| Subject | Intellectual property |
|---|---|
| Subject | Knowledge access |
| Subject | Locke |
| Subject | Seventeenth century |
| Genre | Working paper |
Bibliographic information
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- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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Graduate School of Education Open Archive
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