A little while ago, the semi-ubiquitous learning management system Blackboard announced it was going 2.0 – in its own proprietary fashion. Lumped under the name BeyondInitiative are a series of properties that are designed to connect users worldwide, across education segments and disciplines, and thus leverage the wisdom of the community for teaching and learning. …
Reading Roy Rosenzweig’s thoughtful appraisal of Wikipedia in the current Journal of American History (“Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past”), I was particularly struck by this passage: If Wikipedia is becoming the family encyclopedia for the twenty-first century, historians probably have a professional obligation to make it as good …
Oh to have been a fly on the wall at the just-wrapped Mashup Camp – a fly safely high up on the wall, because a) I’m no programmer and would likely be in the way, and b) its ‘geek dating’ program – a frenetic dance of speed demos and the “law of two feet” – …
Inevitable? Sure. Useful? We’ll see. Wikilaw, an open-content legal resource, is up and running — soliciting off-the-clock, copyleft work from the million lawyers running around the U.S. At least one or two of them must be frustrated graphic artists – imagine if tort reform could be similarly explained: Wikipedia is abandoning the anonymous editing model, …
While Wikipedia is the standard reference for what wikis can do, its newer cousin Wikibooks is, in many respects, a more daring venture. This is a collection of open-content textbooks – that is, modules freely available to and updatable by anyone, covering a wide range of subjects. (General FAQs here) Material on Wikibooks is searchable …
