In 2009 the HSC English course will include Wikipedia as a text. I think that this is an interesting turn in education - particularly as many schools ban wikipedia as a reference for assignments, etc. This is the first time that wikipedia has formally been included in a syllabus in Australia. It's fascinating to see a collaborative site formalised in the education system.
Clay Shirky reckons that society wastes huge amounts of the 'cognitive surplus' watching television - passively consuming other people's collaborative works.
"And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television."
I wonder if studying wikipedia as a text will encourage students (and teachers!) to take online collaborative projects more seriously, and to spend some time participating in them.
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3 comments:
Great thinking here and thanks for sharing with us.
A very interesting post. I really enjoyed it.
Thanks guys.
And another revelation... Encyclopedia Britannica is also endorsing the idea of collaborative content (like wikipedia). Britannica Online wants to create an online community that encourages collaboration for articles, etc, by interacting with their editors. Interestingly they are encouraging people to write using their own names. Read more at: http://britannicanet.com/?p=86
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