the lincoln academic commons

Centre for Educational Research and Development, University of Lincoln.

Teaching in Public: Thinking AloudLincoln 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/Commons-

based_peer_production

Joss Winn | jwinn@lincoln.ac.uk

Lincoln Academic Commons http://commons.lincoln.ac.uk