Access: A Resounding Theme

Access to medical journals so that inventors, including high school students, can innovate to save lives.

 

Access to copyright materials for the purposes of not-for-profit education as an expanded understanding of the fair use exception in statutory law and further embellished in the doctrine of transformative use in current case law.

 

Access to higher education, new models for determining credit and programs to encourage completion, or, access to graduation notwithstanding the formidable challenges that contemporary students face.   

 

Web accessibility for people with cognitive and physical disabilities.

 

Access Denied:  the results of Berkman Center research into how governments control the Internet, and more recently, courtesy of the United States Senate, for a signature on a U.N. Treaty to include disability rights as a human right, with former Senator Robert Dole, 89 years old, sitting in on the vote from his wheelchair, hopes dashed by the political bug-a-boo among his fellow Republicans about abstract notions of U.S. sovereignty.

 

Over the course of the next few blogs, I will explore this theme of access and how it resonates in technology and higher education.  As I suggested about the term "privacy," terms such as access gain a transcendental currency often in defense of that which is being lost as it does for that which is hoped.  What does access mean?  Why does it resonate with so many particular issues?  And what policies: global, national and institutional, can help us achieve goals future generations will look upon with admiration.