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I just arrived in London, England for the Fifth Pan-Commonwealth Forum on Open Learning, organized by the Commonwealth of Learning. The theme of this year’s forum is “Access to Learning for Development,” and my interest in this theme relates to the role that copyright plays in this context.
If you’ve looked at the bewildering details of Canada’s latest stab at copyright reform, you’ll know I’m not here to brag about how Canada’s legal system facilitates access to learning. (To the contrary, the Canadian proposal would lock down learning materials and be likely to impede access to education.) Instead I’ll be talking about ACA2K—the African Copyright and Access to Knowledge Project—the major empirical research project I’m currently involved with.
This is one of my first opportunities to speak about ACA2K, and it will be to a broad multidisciplinary and multinational audience. I’m proud to be co-presenting with Denise Nicholson, the Copyright Services Librarian at Wits University in Johannesburg. I’ll be covering the research phase of the project, explaining what sorts of data we are obtaining and how. Denise will talk about the dissemination and policy engagement aspects of ACA2K.
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