Family, Friends, and OpenTextbook folks,
This paper (
http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.PDF) is by far the most
important paper I've read so far in my short academic life, and in many ways
could be considered the "bible" for what we are trying to do in
OpenTextbooks. To summarize--it's all about how the Internet is making it
possible for very large groups of people to come together to do amazing
things in the creation of information, outside of a commercial model. It
focuses on the economics of it all, but gives some great examples as well.
Some cool sites to look at that are discussed in this article include:
*
www.wikipedia.org (the best encyclopedia on the internet, created purely
by volunteers)
*
http://dmoz.org (an internet directory, rivaling yahoo, that again is
created purely by volunteers)
*
http://clickworkers.arc.nasa.gov/top (a NASA project where volunteers from
all over the world are mapping the craters of Mars
*
http://slashdot.org (an self-moderated community of information ³news for
geeks²)
My personal goal (OpenTextbooks) is to help create a framework for allowing
communities to come together and create free, open textbooks, that hopefully
will not only help kids learn better, but will also save schools literally
millions of dollars a year in costs.
Anyway, please give it a read if you can, or are in the mood. It's quite
long and academic, and might take you a month--but the ideas and principles
therein (I believe) explain very significant social movements afoot.
Please check it out if you can. For those of you doing a literature review
with me, this is a must-read.
John Dehlin
------ Forwarded Message
From: David Wiley <david.wiley(a)gmail.com>
Reply-To: David Wiley <david.wiley(a)gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 11 Nov 2004 20:04:17 -0700
To: <7150(a)itosx.ed.usu.edu>
Subject: [7150] Great paper
Everyone,
Wanted to send out a link to this paper -- one of the best I've read
in the last five years. Literally.
http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.PDF
And yes, this is the paginated version.
For your edification, i.e., not required reading.
D
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