User:Sj/thoughts

From Wikiversity

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

[edit] 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 organiezd 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