User:Sj/thoughts

Thoughts from a recent convo with Cormaggio and mikeu, after One Web Day:

education as part of the Web
I'd love to figure out (with the whole wv community) how we can make education (and any informative social transaction) part of our notion of the Web. This was on my mind during onewebday, when I realized the immaturity of our social concept of what we can accomplish together.

If we didn't have Wikipedia, we would still be touting the web as a way to "share valuable information" and gain acces to unbiased information... as if a free channel suffices to provide valuable, unbiased, and organized knowledge. We currently have the same biases with education -- it is offered by a constellation of people, totally ad hoc, the only organized instances are proprietary and non-free, and those don't pretend to have any uniformity of style, don't recognize the value in parallel structure across courses/materials, and have an interlink ratio of a few links per page, rather than a few per sentence.

We have not recognized in any meaningful way how changing each of these elements of "knowledge about a topic online" makes wikipedia-style knowledge many orders more useful and significant than what existed before (which aside from these changes usually covered the same topics in the same depth). So it is not surprising that when people try to produce new similarly wondrous projects they talk in terms of the tools - a wiki! the internets! - and not in terms of the more subtle changes that really made the difference [say, between wikipedia as of mid-2003 and wikipedia today].


 * I tend to focus more on concrete examples, rather than a higher level view. Take a look at some of my thoughts at Observational astronomy/Planning to see the kind of projects that I think have the potential for transforming education and science on the web.  --mikeu talk 13:00, 27 September 2008 (UTC)


 * I approve of the approach of detailed planning for a specific end. Open Access to Journals is a detailed specific approach that people can rationally get behind -- higher level views tend to evoke religious rather than rational parallels.
 * And one can find a rational excuse or explanation for almost any short-term course of action by picking the right pseudo-metrics and timescales, just as one can find a mythology and vision that allows for almost any extraordinary belief structure. So it is important to address both together.  Sj
 * As an example of how we haven't stretched our minds much here -- both acawiki and p2pu have very traditional notions of what a 'journal' or 'topic' or 'course' is, how to register, how to complete and assess one's completion, and how to advertise a new resource or time-limited collaboration to the world. Sj 00:32, 7 April 2010 (UTC)
 * These are interesting thoughts. I think there are already plenty of examples of how to fuse education with the web. For example, keeping an e-Portfolio of work done is already a relatively established model for assessment: the learner documents what they've done, links to things they've written etc., and this can be checked by a teacher, employer or peers. With collaborative writing on a wiki, the process of documenting what you've done becomes that bit more complex, but certainly not impossible - and of course the transparency of a wiki's history affords such a process. I'd like to talk more about these and other issues you raise. For example, the notion of a time-limited course sits slightly uncomfortably with a wiki - what happens to it after it's done? do we become an archive of previous activities? - but experience shows me that it's a useful model to pursue... Cormaggio talk 10:18, 8 April 2010 (UTC)