John Willinsky

Affiliation

John Willinsky is Khosla Family Professor of Education at Stanford University, as well some-time professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia. He directs the Public Knowledge Project, which is doing research on the intellectual properties of learning and is building free publishing software for scholar-publishers who are working to improve the public and scholarly quality of academic publishing.

Keynote lecture: What's Also Critical About Literacy Then and Now: Its Intellectual Properties

This talk will present a case for considering the intellectual properties of literacy as representing a set of vital but missing, and in that sense critical, lessons about how we think about reading and writing as we move into the digital era. It will explore the play in the term "intellectual properties" by drawing on historical and contemporary instances to see how this concept is used to establish value, govern discourse, and institute authority. The talk will reach back to Ghent's monastic heritage for the earliest of missing formative lessons in the West, in which literacy and learning form a close association as a way of moving the world by stepping away it. It will leap forward to the critical interventions that have emerged in the formative years of this new highly literate medium, so that we may see how open source software, open access to research, Creative Commons, Wikipedia and related developments form critical lessons in literacy by way of this idea of intellectual property. The talk will also draw on my experiences with the Public Knowledge Project over the last decade in trying to open an alternative channel for the intellectual property status of the academic work that we do. It will argue, ultimately, that the critical principle behind such interests in the intellectual properties of literacy comes at the intersection of cultural studies and pedagogy. It is as if we would not only interpret the world in various ways; for the point was to change the world, to paraphrase one short-term resident of Brussels.

In addition to his keynote lecture, John Willinsky will also organize a seminar entitled: Critically Realigning Literacy's Intellectual Properties: Examples and Exemplars

About

After working for some time on the educational implications of such knowledge systems as literary theory, historical dictionaries, and European imperialism, prof. Willinsky has come to focus on both analyzing and altering scholarly publishing practices to understand whether this body of knowledge might yet become more of a public resource for learning and deliberation.

His work on the Public Knowledge Project is focused on extending access to, and the accessibility of, knowledge through online sources. The research is on student, professional, and public access to research and scholarship, while development continues on designing systems to improve the public and scholarly quality of peer-reviewed journals. In addition, international collaborations in Latin America, Africa, and South-East Asia are aimed at helping to better understand and strengthen scholarly publishing in those areas.

Professor Willinsky's research interests are:

• Information Literacy
• Intellectual Property, Learning, and John Locke
• Scholarly Communication
• Sociology of Knowledge