The Age of Knowledge emphasizes that the ongoing transformations of knowledge, both within universities and for society more generally, must be understood as a reflection of the larger changes in the constitutive social structures within which they are invariably produced, translated and reproduced.
The changes brought about by digital technology and the consequent explosion of information known as Big Data have brought opportunities and challenges in all areas of society, and the law is no exception. This book, Knowledge of the Law in the Big Data Age contains a selection of the papers presented at the conference ‘Law via the Internet 2018’, held in Florence, Italy, on 11-12 October 2018. This annual conference of the ‘Free Access to Law Movement’ (http://www.fatlm.org) hosted more than 60 international speakers from universities, government and research bodies as well as EU institutions. Topics covered range from free access to law and Big Data and data analytics in the legal domain, to policy issues concerning access, publishing and the dissemination of legal information, tools to support democratic participation and opportunities for digital democracy. The book is divided into 3 sections: Part I provides an introductory background, covering aspects such as the evolution of legal science and models for representing the law; Part II addresses the present and future of access to law and to various legal information sources; and Part III covers updates in projects, initiatives, and concrete achievements in the field. The book provides an overview of the practical implementation of legal information systems and the tools to manage this special kind of information, as well as some of the critical issues which must be faced, and will be of interest to all those working at the intersection of law and technology.
A transnational approach to understanding and analyzing knowledge circulation. Focusing on what happens to knowledge at national borders, rather than treating it as flowing like currents across them, or diffusing out from center to periphery, the contributors to this collection stress the human intervention that shapes and drives how knowledge is processed, mobilized, and repurposed in transnational transactions to serve differing and uneven interests, constraints, and environments. The chapters consider both what knowledge travels and how it travels across borders of varying permeability that impede or facilitate its movement. They look closely at a vast range of platforms and objects of knowledge, from tangible commodities--like hybrid wheat seeds, penicillin, Robusta coffee, naval weaponry, and high-performance computers--to the more conceptual apparatuses of telecommunications, statistics, and food sovereignty. Moreover, this volume decenters the Global North, tracking how knowledge moves along multiple paths across the borders of Mexico, India, Portugal, Guinea-Bissau, the Soviet Union, China, Angola, and Palestine and the West Bank, as well as the United States and United Kingdom. The variety of the kinds of knowledge addressed in the chapters brings forth an extraordinary array of state and non-state actors and institutions committed to performing the work needed to move knowledge across national borders.
A movement emerges to challenge the tightening of intellectual property law around the world. At the end of the twentieth century, intellectual property rights collided with everyday life. Expansive copyright laws and digital rights management technologies sought to shut down new forms of copying and remixing made possible by the Internet. International laws expanding patent rights threatened the lives of millions of people around the world living with HIV/AIDS by limiting their access to cheap generic medicines. For decades, governments have tightened the grip of intellectual property law at the bidding of information industries; but recently, groups have emerged around the world to challenge this wave of enclosure with a new counter-politics of "access to knowledge" or "A2K." They include software programmers who took to the streets to defeat software patents in Europe, AIDS activists who forced multinational pharmaceutical companies to permit copies of their medicines to be sold in poor countries, subsistence farmers defending their rights to food security or access to agricultural biotechnology, and college students who created a new "free culture" movement to defend the digital commons. Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property maps this emerging field of activism as a series of historical moments, strategies, and concepts. It gathers some of the most important thinkers and advocates in the field to make the stakes and strategies at play in this new domain visible and the terms of intellectual property law intelligible in their political implications around the world. A Creative Commons edition of this work will be freely available online.
In this book, Carl Bereiter--a distinguished and well-known cognitive, educational psychologist--presents what he calls "a new way of thinking about knowledge and the mind." He argues that in today's Knowledge Age, education's conceptual tools are inadequate to address the pressing educational challenges and opportunities of the times. Two things are required: first, to replace the mind-as-container metaphor with one that envisions a mind capable of sustaining knowledgeable, intelligent behavior without actually containing stored beliefs; second, to recognize a fundamental difference between knowledge building and learning--both of which are essential parts of education for the knowledge age. Connectionism in cognitive science addresses the first need; certain developments in post-positivist epistemology address the second. The author explores both the theoretical bases and the practical educational implications of this radical change in viewpoint. The book draws on current new ways of thinking about knowledge and mind, including information processing, cognitive psychology, situated cognition, constructivism, social constructivism, and connectionism, but does not adhere strictly to any "camp." Above all, the author is concerned with developing a way of thinking about the mind that can usher education into the knowledge age. This book is intended as a starting point.
In Thriving in the Knowledge Age, John Falk and Beverly Sheppard argue that museums require a radically new business model to survive the transition into the knowledge age. Only by shifting towards more personalized and community-based learning experiences can museums reverse the declining attendance figures of the twenty-first century. Written to provide clear answers to fundamental questions about the purpose and goals of the museum of the future, this visionary book is a must-have for museum professionals and trustees.
We are living in a defining moment, when the world in which teachers do their work is changing profoundly. In his latest book, Hargreaves proposes that we have a one-time chance to reshape the future of teaching and schooling and that we should seize this historic opportunity. Hargreaves sets out what it means to teach in the new knowledge society, to prepare young people for a world of creativity and flexibility and to protect them against the threats of mounting insecurity. He provides inspiring examples of schools that operate as creative and caring learning communities and shows how years of "soulless standardization" have seriously undermined similar attempts made by many non-affluent schools. Hargreaves takes us beyond the dead-ends of standardization and divisiveness to a future in which all teaching can be a high-skill, creative, life-shaping mission because "the knowledge society requires nothing less." This major commentary on the state of today's teaching profession in a knowledge-driven world is theoretically original and strategically powerful?a practical, inspiring, and challenging guide to rethinking the work of teaching.
Higher education exposes a key paradox of neoliberalism. The project of neoliberalism was said to be that of rolling back the state to liberate individuals, by replacing government bureaucracy with the free market. Rather than have the market serve individuals however, individuals were to serve the market. The marketisation ‘reforms’ in higher education, which sought to reshape knowledge production, with students investing in human capital and academics producing ‘transferable’ research, to make higher education of use to the economy, has resulted in extensive government bureaucracy and oppressive managerialist bureaucracy which is inefficient and expensive. Neoliberalism has always had authoritarian aspects and these are now coming to bear on universities. The state does not want critical and informed graduate citizens, but a hollowed out public sphere defined by consumption, willing servitude to the market and deference to state power. Attempts to reshape universities with bureaucracy are now accompanied by a culture war, attacking the production of critical knowledge. The authors in this book explore these issues and the possibilities for resistance and progressive change.
This book develops the notion of 'knowledge cultures' as a basis for understanding the possibilities of education and development in the age of knowledge capitalism. 'Knowledge cultures' refers to the cultural preconditions in the new production of knowledge and their basis in shared practices, embodying preferred ways of doing things often developed over many generations. These practices also point to the way in which cultures have different repertoires of representational and non-representational forms of knowing. The book discusses knowledge cultures in relation to claims for the new economy, as well as cultural economy and the politics of postmodernity. It focuses on national policy constructions of the knowledge economy, 'fast knowledge' and the role of the so-called 'new pedagogy' and social learning under these conditions.