Social software
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Social software facilitates the construction of online communities of peers who are seeking to achieve a common purpose. Wikipedia, a prime example of an activity carried out by use of social software, has a useful overview of the different types. These tools facilitate participation in the online peer-production of resources about what educates. In addition to using these tools, contributors to StudyPlace can inquire into their implications for the prospective development of education and culture.
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[edit] Social software and the commodification of educational opportunities
Social software does more than make collaborations easier. It can also expand the scope and value of the ideas and the knowledge that are freely open to all in the public domain. To the degree that it does so, it affects the legitimating principles controlling the distribution and use of educational resources.
To what degree should educational resources be open to all and if not open to all, what principles should legitimate access to them for some and exclusion for others? This question has a long history and it is especially interesting now because significant contextual conditions bearing on answers are changing, rapidly and deeply.[1] Social software is altering how people can produce and distribute many culturally valuable works. This fact has become evident, although the scope and upshot of the change is still far from clear. From one direction, public schools — the common schools — are under privitizing pressures of uncertain strength as market instrumentalists argue that commodification of education will make it more efficient by enabling markets to allocate the supply of schooling according to the demand of students. From the other direction, a free, peer-produced, ubiquitous, multi-lingual encyclopedia of unprecedented scope and improving quality is likely to decommodify a venerable form of publication, thereby driving commercial encyclopedias entirely out of business. In response to these developments, jurists and political theorists are reexamining long dormant issues about property and the public domain.
[edit] Key sources
Here are an initial listing of sources for thinking about social software and the intellectual commons. Be selective — there is far more here than any will read within the scope of the workshop. But also be proactive and make additions — there is much not listed here that should be on any reasonably full listing.
[edit] Examples
[edit] Notes
- ↑ Legitimating differences of educational opportunity is very hard to do. Why should a child, by virtue of circumstances imposed at birth and beyond, for good and ill, be burdened with the consequences throughout the whole of life? Two places in Plato's Republic are of lasting importance. The first is the Myth of the Metals, which presents the archetype of the legitimating arguments used with variations over and over in cultural history. Plato made clear his understanding that the argument was a bunch of malarkey that those in control will use to consolidate and perpetuate their position. Plato's other set of responses, the Myth of Er, is much more complicated, and unfortunately a set of arguments far less influential historically that those he mocked. Compare the Republic 414b-415d to 614a-621d.
