Perpetuity

While I was reading the course blog and the discussion board and previewing some of the produsage assignments already posted (which are quite impressive so far), my thoughts were drifting back to all the discussion board topics in the class so far.

The recurring them is "yes, but how do we use it in the classroom?" Some are embracing the concepts and some are still apprehensive about it all. Some need a lesson plan to have a start and a finish, so "produsage" just doesn't work in the traditional model of instruction. If it isn't complete, how do we grade it?

The whole thought process sent me back in time to the 2008 WCET Conference, where one of the speakers was Edward Ayers, President of University of Richmond. I remember him talking about his project The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the America Civil War and how the project developed into a usable model over time. The project is a very detailed historic learning portal on the Web, which chronicles two communities during the American Civil War (http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/). The project is not Web 2.0, as access to changing the site is limited to just a select few. However, Ayers might have provided the answer for how to grade incomplete works in a Web 2.0 environment.

Ayers' project took many years to get to the point it is at now. During that time, he continued to teach history and tried to find a way to tie his teaching and the project together in a useful way. His answer was to assign students with the task of coming up with one piece of historic data for his database, with a final paper of 3-5 paragraphs maximum explaining the event or person. He took the finished papers and included them in his searchable database. Students were using the database to find something to research and write about, such as a person mentioned in a letter but not yet researched, and then writing a brief paper that would be included in the database, which the next class would use to do their research.

With one class completing just one small piece of the overall project, the students completed something, but the project continues to be an incomplete living document, of sorts. In our produsage assignment, we have done the same thing. We have created a living "document" to which new generations of students can add. Our course wiki is a perfect example. We created the wiki and seeded it with lots of information. By the end of the course, it will probably be even better populated with information. Will it be complete on the last day of class? It can't be, because there's no such thing as complete in a Web 2.0 world that is constantly changing. When the class is offered again, the course wiki can once again be introduced and a new crop of students can work on it some more. Four or five course offerings down the road, it could easily be one of the best sources of Web 2.0 tools and explanations anywhere on the Web, with each class contributing along the way.

That excites me.