calebnavidson - January 31st, 2006

Looking at the Wikipedia, and reading Yochai Benkler’s paper on education and open source content, I am wondering if teachers are institutionally compelled to collaborate on microcontent. We edit the wikipedia, and can tweak documents. But it is harder for many academics to create larger works together.
I suspect this stems in part from the two cultures cultural divide. Scientists are predisposed to collaborative inquiry. Indeed, we can look at the early Royal Society, where a distributed network of interested parties developed many projects, ideas, and papers. Like a collective detective, these scientists identified and explored problems.