Calling libraries the ‘Information Commons’ doesn’t quite feed the more helpful notions of the commons, or of education, in my opinion. The notion does nothing to challenge the idea that education is just about information delivery, which does nothing to challenge the idea that students are just empty vessels to be filled up (which cliché popped up again in an episode of Fringe I was watching last night).
I’m playing around with the notion of the Conversation Commons at the moment, particularly in relation to freeschool or free university energies. This idea is closer to what I value about education. It takes the notion of conversation, at its best a non-urgent space and non-urgent time for respect and listening and adaptive exploration, and joins it to the notion of the commons, at its best a way of talking about non-commodified and non-commodifying relationships. I’ve written a lot about notions of enclosure and the commons in the past (see http://www.anthonymccann.com for more), and I think there are ways to rescue meanings of the commons, to make them more suitable for resistance to the everyday enclosures of managerialism, or overbearing commercialisation. What’s very important, for me, is to steer my own use of the notion of the commons away from discussion of resource production, management, and consumption. There be dragons, as they say, dragons that offer us few ways to talk about our emotional lives, resistance, the unhelpfulness of increasing encroachments of enclosure, or particular qualities of relationship. People and qualities of relationship before resources. For the moment, allying the notion of conversation to the notion of the commons maybe moves the commons conversation away from being primarily about resources, at least a little, and towards people and presence and being there and working in withness and seeing how it goes.
The idea is to start a regular gathering in Derry/Londonderry based around the notion of the Conversation Commons, to invite people to a safe space of vulnerability, where people are also invited to become more accountable, response-able, and transparent in their thinking about their thinking. Just chat for chat’s sake is occasionally fine and dandy, but there is work to be done, and we can become more subtly aware of the differences we always-already make. It’s time. Indeed, it already was.
