Jimbo (Wikipedia) Wales guest-posts at Lawrence Lessig’s blog
He is going down a list of “Ten things that will be free.” Not should be free, but will be free. #2 is Curriculum.
Commentor Frank has a very good point – there’s a financial incentive to produce non-free curricula. What’s the incentive to produce free curricula? A sense of public service? A tiny bit of ego perhaps (but let’s call it Mazlowvian self-actualization)?
This was echoed in a recent discussion on ITFORUM on the value that publishers add in the new world of online self-publishing. David Wiley made the point that the real value that publishers can bring is the process of editing and providing a structure for peer-review of content. (One might counter that that’s the same argument made by the “MSM” against blogs, invoking the high and mighty system of “journalistic checks and balances.”)
The main problem that I see is that without a well thought out compensation model, the quality of freely-produced content is going to be all over the map. As was pointed out in the comments, good writing and good illustrations matter a great deal and take time and effort. Where does this time and effort come from? Wikipedia is an interesting model of how people can and will contribute their spare time (and I’ve certainly done my bit), but the product that results is inconsistent.
How do you enforce a style sheet on unmanaged and unmanageable volunteers? Without a system of compensation, how do you make clear roles and expectations? If Expert A doesn’t like the edits that Writer B makes to his ramblings, he can pack up his kit and go away, leaving an article – or a book – or an interactive multimedia program – high and dry. What then? Do we blithely assume that someone else with copious amounts of free time will just step in and pick up the pieces out of a sense of social contribution? That certainly seems to be the case.
Ok, Will Richardson did what I was trying to do, but better and more thoroughly. Not surprising, that. The bottom line is that trying to follow a conversation that’s split up liek this is darned hard to do. It’s brain-stretching.
The question I still have is, is this medium fundamentally any different? Is there something unique about blogs as a communications medium – as opposed to email lists or threaded discussions or ham radio or town hall meetings – that engenders this kind of activity? And if it does, is the activity of blogging fundamentally any different from other kinds of reading-writing-feedback?
Brian Lamb and the commentors on his site make an important point about the digital divide. Those of us who blog are a tiny fraction of the Internet population. And many people just aren’t interested. Yet, anyway. There’s a fair amount of technology to be mastered, and a lot of instructors are still barely understanding email.
Technology does not change people’s needs. It changes the way they get their needs met. Kids today email and IM like crazy. When I was in school we talked on the phone or hung out in the tree-fort, and passed notes in class. Same thing, different tools.
I commented on Alan’s site that a conversation distributed across several blogs is difficult to track. It’s like having a houseful of kids, all of whom want to talk to you at the same time. Alan replied that “real-world” conversations are distributed and unstructured, so we should not impose artificial structures on them.
I don’t agree. The real world is full of highly structured conversations – formal debate, parlimentary procedures, round-tables, panel discussions, etc.. Those structures are artificial, but very useful. They exist to make the conversation orderly, and hopefully thereby more efficient. (Sometimes the structure deliberately makes the process inefficient, as in the U.S. Senate.)Â
A discussion that’s spread out over a number of blogs is sort of like a cracker-barrel session at a conference. You go from table to table picking up bits and pieces here and there, never quite sure if you’re getting all the pieces.
Now, that may not be a bad thing. But assuming that it’s automatically a GOOD thing is going a bit too far.
It’s plenty challenging for a participant in the conversation to keep tabs on what’s going on. Trying to track it as a lurker is even more difficult. Will Richardson pointed out that RSS is the glue that holds the conversation together. That’s spot-on; I would not have known about Alan’s response to my comment had I not gotten his reply via email. Having injected myself into the discussion, I can subscribe to the comments feed (NB: Alan’s blog has a comments feed, not all blog engines do.)Â
But what’s a poor lurker to do?
…Â at Edublogs.org. Another interface, another set of features.Â
I’m not quite sure what this particular skin looks like, as the thumbnails I expected to see under the “presentation” tab didn’t appear.Â
