First Monday has an article on seeking an educational commons by Gary Hepburn:

Public schools and other educational institutions need to become more familiar with some of the opportunities that are emerging as a result of open source projects. Leveraging the potential of the Internet as a collaborative medium, open source development projects are producing software and other resources that have the potential to meet many needs of schools. As educators become aware of open source resources, they will immediately recognize the advantages of low%u2013cost alternatives to many commercial products that schools currently use and find expensive. They will also notice that open source resources lack some of the usage restrictions that characterize commercial resources. The low cost and flexibility of open source products makes them very attractive, but no less important is the way in which these resources align with some core educational values. In this article, I illustrate this alignment by exploring the promise that open source resources hold in supporting the ideal of an educational commons.