Access for EVERYONE

I’ve been think­ing about acces­si­bil­ity in lit­tle dif­fer­ent terms lately. More and more I’m embrac­ing a wider con­cept of acces­si­bil­ity and access that extends far beyond the dis­abil­ity com­mu­nity. It is the idea that wher­ever con­tent can eas­ily be made freely acces­si­bly to be used by the masses, it should be. Too often, the free exchange of infor­ma­tion is being sti­fled by copy­rights, password-protected direc­to­ries and con­tent dis­trib­u­tors. How­ever, there is a lot going on to cre­ate more open con­tent, with projects such as Cre­ative Com­mons and MIT Open­Course­Ware and thinkers such as Lawrence Lessig, Stephen Downes and David Wiley .

It seems that bat­tle lines are being drawn, one side being those who want more con­trol over how their con­tent is dis­trib­uted and used vs. those advo­cat­ing for grant­ing more access and usage rights for users. While the free con­tent move­ment has been some­what on the fringes, it is show­ing up more and more in main­stream media. Over the next few years there will be more and more dis­cus­sion around this topic as both sides seek to defend their posi­tion and con­vince (or con­strain) the gen­eral pub­lic to adopt one way of think­ing or the other.

Some learn­ers are faced with a dou­ble bar­rier. They may 1) be unable to access and use con­tent because of cost or copy­right and 2) there may still be acces­si­bil­ity issuess once those bar­ri­ers are over­come . Hope­fully in the con­tin­u­ing dia­logue on these issues soci­ety and our law­mak­ers can forge and accept new ideas about the way we think about con­tent in the 21st century.