I'm forwarding something that has nothing to do with museums, but everything to do with the wiki phenomenon, which is pretty much up our alley. If this article presciently predicts the demise of the texbook publishing industry, remember, you read it here first.
Amalyah Keshet =================================================== From: <-- The Filter --> October 2006 Your regular dose of public-interest Internet news and commentary from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. ==================================================== <snip> >From Reading to Writing Textbooks By David Weinberger In the mid 1990s I moderated a panel at some conference with Bruce Tognazzini as a panelist. Tog, as he likes to be called, was the lead designer of the Macintosh's user interface. He was working on the "Star" project for Sun at the time. On the topic of education, Tog said something that seems to be more true every day: students shouldn't be reading textbooks -- they ought to be writing them. At the time I thought this was a clever thing to say with some but not enough truth to it. It smacked of a denigration of learning that I find both attractive and repulsive. But now that we have wikis, I find it mainly attractive. Textbooks serve an important purpose in many classes. As a professor of writing at University of Houston Downtown said at a breakout session I was at last week, they can enunciate a vocabulary that enables conversation. They organize (and commoditize) knowledge according to the experience of an expert in the field. Students cannot reasonably be expected to write a textbook that competes with a published one. But, textbooks also often present a field as, well, a field that one is going to conquer by marching through it, one turn of the page at a time. And, because they're paper, all the links are broken. Every one of them. So, in some fields, I'm now with Tog. Give the shared vocabulary in class, and then send your students out to build a wiki that by the end of the course expresses what they've learned together. Let them argue about how to organize it. Keep the discussion pages up. Keep the differences visible. Let them fill it with links. Let them connect with other students in other schools creating related wikis. A class's wiki is not going to be as complete, well-grounded or well-written as a good textbook. But students will learn more by writing one than by cribbing and cramming from a professional textbook. And they may learn something that few textbooks manage to convey: why the people in that field are in the field. If all you know about the study of history is what you read in your history text, how the study of history can grab a person and throw her through the rest of her life will remain a mystery. But, if your class is doing the work of history -- or at least meta-history -- by writing a wiki textbook on, say, the Renaissance, you may get an inkling. You may. Of course, this messes with the grading system. How do you grade students individually for social knowledge? But how sad is it that when it comes to education, our measurement techniques shape what is to be measured... Read more: * Tog: <http://www.asktog.com/> * O'Reilly on-demand textbook project (Safari U): <http://www.safariu.com/> * CNN on interactive, social textbooks: <http://archives.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/08/30/coolsc.ebooks/index.html> * Wiki textbook project: <http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page> <snip> [7] FILTER FACTS ============== * Talk Back Tell us what you think - send feedback and news announcements to: <filter at cyber.law.harvard.edu> * Subscription Info Subscribe or Unsubscribe: <http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/signup> * About Us The Filter is a publication of the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School. Editor: Amanda Michel * Not a Copyright This work is hereby released into the public domain. Please share it. To read the public domain dedication, visit: <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain>
