Centre for Educational Research and Development, University of Lincoln.
Teaching in Public: Thinking Aloud
Lincoln Academic Commons: Creating a Knowledge Gift Culture
January 27th 2009
Joss Winn
“He who receives an idea from me,
receives instruction himself without
lessening mine; as he who lights a taper at
mine, receives light without darkening me.”
Thomas Jefferson, Letters, 1813.
The idea of student as producer encourages the development of
collaborative relations between student and academic for the
production of knowledge… An exemplar alternative organizing principle is
already proliferating in universities in the form of open, networked
collaborative initiatives which are not intrinsically anti-capital but,
fundamentally, ensure the free and creative use of research materials.
Initiatives such as Science Commons, Open Knowledge and Open Access,
are attempts by academics and others to lever the Internet to ensure that
research output is free to use, re-use and distribute without legal, social or
technological restriction. Through these efforts, the organizing principle is
being redressed creating a teaching, learning and research environment
which promotes the values of openness and creativity, engenders equity
among academics and students and thereby offers an opportunity to
reconstruct the student as producer and academic as collaborator. In
an environment where knowledge is free, the roles of the educator and the
institution necessarily change. The educator is no longer a delivery
vehicle and the institution becomes a landscape for the production
and construction of a mass intellect in commons.
Neary, M. with Winn, J. (2009) ‘Student as Producer: Reinventing the Undergraduate Curriculum’ in M. Neary, H. Stevenson, and L. Bell, (eds)
(2008) The Future of Higher Education: Policy, Pedagogy and the Student Experience, Continuum, London
Open Access repositories: Originally
subject-based, within the science
community. http://arxiv.org (Cornell
University, est.1991. Alexa rank 15,056)
£14m investment in repositories and
preservation in UK HE 2006-9.
144 Institutional Repositories in the UK,
over 1300 worldwide (OpenDOAR)
• European Research Council (ERC)
• Five of the seven RCUK Research Councils
• Wellcome Trust and others…
…require funded researchers to deposit their work in an
Institutional Repository.
In addition, the UK Parliamentary Select Committee on
Science & Technology and the European University
Association (EUA) both formally recommend mandating the
deposit of research publications in an Open Access
Institutional Repository.
Open Access Journals
• 2,846 OA journals, 445 more than a year
ago
• net growth rate of 1.2 titles per calendar
day over the past year.
code_swarm
Tools For Group Collaboration
Derivatives of…
• IRC, Revision Control System, Mailing
Lists
• Wikis, Blogs, various online collaborative
software (i.e. 37signals.com), online office
applications (i.e Google Docs, etc.)
• A License: this is fundamental! A license is
an enabling tool for collaboration.
• Scientific Commons (2006) http://www.scientificcommons.org/
• MIT OpenCourseWare (2002)
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm
• Creative Commons (2001) http://creativecommons.org/license/
• Open Access Timeline (A Social Movement…)
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access_movement
• Open Knowledge Foundation (2004) http://www.okfn.org/ &
http://www.opendefinition.org/1.0
• OAISTER (2002) http://www.oaister.org/
• Directory of Open Access Journals (2008) http://www.doaj.org/ (just
under 10% of peer-reviewed journals worldwide are OA).
• OpenDOAR (2006) http://www.opendoar.org/
• Laurence Lessig: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lessig
• Yochai Benkler: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonsbased_peer_production
Joss Winn | [email protected]
Lincoln Academic Commons
http://commons.lincoln.ac.uk