Admittedly, even the most starry-eyed 2.0 prophets have trouble describing how communal software is to work its magic, once it’s scooped out of the vast flickring seas and let loose within the tiny microclimate of a classroom.

Mark, I think you are misrepresenting Benkler a bit here. Dumping Web 2.0 into the existing classroom won’t work - the challenge is recasting the classroom to accomodate some of the new objectives participatory culture presents.

Specifically, we can imagine unleashing classes upon large database and repository problems - problems larger than a single student, or even a single class in a single semester could hope to tackle. The key is to design assignments so that units of work are tractable and meaningful.

But maybe the real insight here is breaking free from the course-centric model of teaching, to a student-centric model of teaching. One where the arbitrary ending date of the semester does not automatically dissolve the community of learners or the projets they have undertaken. The ability of the student to transcend the course, the department, the institution, and time itself are what the prophets are heralding. As they say, a prophet is not recognized in his own land…

/Jonah