IZUM as a UNESCO Regional Centre

At its 36th General Assembly in November 2011, UNESCO adopted the decision to grant IZUM the status of a category 2 centre. One year later, the Agreement between the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Republic of Slovenia was signed in Paris, specifying and defining IZUM’s functions as a regional category 2 centre under the auspices of UNESCO. The most significant events and our reflections after three years of performing this function are presented.

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Information resources in the academic environment

Learning and knowledge acquisition with new forms of learning in the education process is based on one”s construction and deconstruction of meaning and the learner”s interaction with the world in a certain social and cultural environment. Each person is responsible for their own learning and how to manage it. As active learning is based on independent and active engagement in the teaching and learning process, finding and gathering information from various sources is an important part of any form of learning and teaching, particularly in the academic environment.

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Structural crisis of copyright, part 1

Copyright is a type of intellectual property. Not only is the Slovene term “avtorska pravica” (author’s right) not the best translation of the term copyright (i.e. the right to copy an item), it is also misleading, as if the central person is the author and not the holder of the right to copy something. While the author is undoubtedly the holder of the moral copyright, he is rarely also the holder of the material rights. Moral copyright has no market value and is insignificant from the perspective of a social system where only money counts. The attitude towards copyright also depends on the business model, e.g. “long-tail” or “freechange”.

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