John Rawls, Fairness and Networked Tools
Up until now, I’ve been a bit confused about how best to approach the meaning of fairness in a thoughtful enough way to help inform this project. Again, this study is a further investigation into copyright law and its impact on the ability of teachers and students to share access to teaching and learning materials in the digital age. But after reading John Rawls’ “Justice as Fairness“, I believe I now have a much more solid foundation upon which to move ahead with this inquiry.
While I initially thought the jump from the Greeks to 20th century political philosophy was going to be great (while it still may be), Rawls’ essay was incredibly helpful to me in breaking down a number of important concepts that I had not yet sorted out; these being the differentiation between notions of Justice, Equality and Fairness. This reading not only helped me to gain a better understanding of these words, their meanings, and how they’ve been used, but it guided me closer towards finding a definition of fairness in the digital age.
I also want to point out that the wiki for this project was a very helpful tool for gathering quotes and parsing key concepts in the essay. This process allowed me to manipulate text and arrange my ideas in a much more configurable way than simply paper and pen would have allowed. This observation of educational uses of networked tools is also a key focus of this project (and my graduate program more broadly) in understanding their use and how others perceive and ultimately decide to use them or not as effective methods of online communication.
In my next post, I will present my analysis of “Justice as Fairness” and how certain concepts found within may help to provide a useful framework for approaching this study.
