CCCC Panel Proposal
(As seen on KairosNews and Open Access News.) Here's the panel proposal that several of us intrepid IP folks put together:
With the verdict in the Eldred v. Ashcroft case and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, the last decade has seen a steady dwindling of the intellectual and creative works in the public commons. This panel will demonstrate the significance of the current intellectual property climate as it intersects with authorship, technology, the fiction of scarcity, and the collaborative model of open source software. The presenters argue that collaborative authorship and open access to information and creative works portend thriving knowledge formation in composition pedagogy and scholarship.
"Open Source/Open Access as Social Constructionist Epistemology”
In Eric Raymond's cathedral/bazaar dichotomy, the bazaar of open source development is a highly collaborative method of constructing knowledge; traditionally in our field and other scholarly disciplines, an individual or small groups of authors construct texts that are distributed from our ivory towers as finished, polished products, a parallel to cathedral building. Such insights from principles of open source and open access, when coupled with Kenneth Bruffee's social constructionist theories and explanations of nonfoundational learning, will illustrate openness as a nonfoundational knowledge making paradigm that privileges sharing and collaboration more than our current publishing model.
"The Author and The Commons”
Speaker #2 merges postmodern constructions of authorship in order to provide a groundwork for examining authorship within the context of the digital intellectual commons. Drawing upon the theories of Foucault, Barthes, and Deleuze and Guattari, Speaker #2 develops a notion of "rhizomatic authorship" that supports collaborative authorship as well as the creation of derivative and shared works. Blogs and wikis may be understood as sites of this commons, and thus serve as a proving ground for the concepts discussed in this presentation.
"Hacking Higher Ed: Envisioning New Models of Institutional Knowledge Production"
Transforming the classroom, department, or institution to operate more like an Open Source software project, with its semi-autonomous teams of knowledge developers, is a viable model for teaching and learning that stands in contrast to the current proprietary model and engages the best practices of collaboration and revision native to composition. Speaker #3 will discuss the applicability of this model of literacy-centered, community-driven, and cross-disciplinary processes of knowledge production to the work of teaching and learning and will explore implications for WAC and service learning.
“How Much Should You Pay for a C+ Paper? The Production, Circulation, and Ownership of Student Writing”
Speaker #4 uses scholarship on the use value and exchange value of student writing as a starting point from which to examine the pedagogical problems associated with understanding digitally reproducable text as economically "scarce" (limited and unequally available) property. Applying neoclassical and Marxian economic theories to the economies of wired writing classrooms compels an understanding of such classrooms as potential sites for students' upward class mobility, wherein digitally reproduced texts are seen not as scarce and solely owned pieces of intellectual property, but as circulating instances of students' communal appropriations of their own surplus labor.