Comments on opinions-universities

As someone involved with an MIT course (MAS.714 / Technologies for Creative Learning) that will soon be archived & available within MIT Open Courseware, I would suggest that the sharing of course knowledge is a powerful, if complex issue, and that "money" doesn't necessarily need to seek out those institutions which have placed that as a high priority.

While it's one thing to offer course resources (hey, here's our syllabus) one has to consider that many of the articles we've read are privately held (another issue to tackle) and that our in-class discussion is, for the most part, an off the record and/or private conversation held within a community of learners; not all information is for public consumption. Not my insane ramblings, thanks!

This became a problem when most of our course materials were housed within a Wiki. The MIT OCW people have had to strip a bunch of our text from the Wiki - for public consumption - with the intent to protect our privacy. Great, so most of my useful points have disappeared, and now there's an incomplete picture of what I had written... and that's available to the public!

I'll contrast this with a course here at Harvard - FAS/1699, a cultural anthropology course on "life online." While our work is again housed within a wiki, again, we've touched the sensitive topic of sharing amongst our peers the research we've conducted -- which of course could benefit the public, but will have to do so within the conform of a published paper, rather than shared course materials... e.g. the wiki. So, all our materials are hidden.

Which is all to say that while it's great to share course materials, I disagree that focusing money toward schools with open courses is best; 1) because much of the course has to be stripped before it can ever reach the public (in most cases, the accessible parts) 2) because the course is about much more than the resources, but the community and 3) because much of the good that comes of coursework is the impact that students make in conjunction with their work, not simply the work itself.

But then also, consider the public need. This is something more of a conversation, rather than a wiki-reply-post, I'm afraid...

Yet, my suggestion would be to work with something like Wikibooks (arguably, a resource that makes other scaffolded resources available) to strengthen the community of learners, rather than simply provide access to the literal resources. Wikibooks is much more accessible, as it's written by a small minority of "the mob," rather than didactic, rushed profs. Content is great, but accessibility is really the key.

And damn, I'm late for a meeting!

--dave p.s. Look me up. It's been a while since GHS..

-- dave 2005-04-28 14:48 UTC

Hey, hope you got my email. Will reply more to this later. For now, I'll note that the 1699 story reminded me of the term ContextSwizzling.

-- bayle 2005-06-27 08:09 UTC