Common Wisdom: Peer Production of Educational Materials

by Yochai Benkler

The networked environment seems to have successfully released enormous creative energy in domains ranging from software design to encyclopedia writing. It has come, in many cases, to compete with and outperform traditional proprietary, market-based production. The question we face is whether the basic economics and organizational strategy that have proved so successful in other areas are equally applicable to learning objects and other educational resources. The answer seems to it depends.

32 pages, Paperback

Published September 13, 2005

About the author

Yochai Benkler (born 1964) is an Israeli-American author and the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. He is also a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

From 1984 to 1987, Benkler was a member and treasurer of the Kibbutz Shizafon. He received his LL.B. from Tel-Aviv University in 1991 and J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1994. He worked at the law firm Ropes & Gray from 1994–1995. He clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer from 1995 to 1996. Benkler is the last person to clerk for a U.S. Supreme Court justice without having prior judicial clerkship experience.

He was a professor at New York University School of Law from 1996 to 2003, and visited at Yale Law School and Harvard Law School (during 2002–2003), before joining the Yale Law School faculty in 2003. In 2007, Benkler joined Harvard Law School, where he teaches and is a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Benkler is on the advisory board of the Sunlight Foundation. In 2011, his research led him to receive the $100,000 Ford Foundation Social Change Visionaries Award.