On critical literacy: Maintaining an ‘open’ discourse on technology and intellectual property in the professional communication classroom

Abstract

This paper examines positions on intellectual property from the vantages of the corporate workplace and the open source community. Universities are showing growing enthusiasm for adopting open source applications along with their ideology. The concern is that the open source ideology, which favors using intellectual property law to enable the distribution of information, is becoming the dominant and perhaps only discourse for teaching critical literacy in the technical communication classroom. As a result, graduating students enter the workplace with a much different perspective on intellectual property than their employers. N.B. This paper represents an earlier stage of an evolving longer article expanding to cover specific open source applications and open access publishing.