(hyper)textuality.org

Wikis Flattened the Earth

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, VP of IBM, is quoted in The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman:

This emerging era is characterized by the collaborative innovation of many people working in gifted communitites, just as innovation in the industrial era was characterized by individual genius.

Will R. of Weblogg-ed adds, in a discussion of the book, that

We are still in a model that awards individual genius more than collaborative innovation... yet in an exceedingly more 'open source' world, contribution is the expectation.

In agreement, I'll say that wikis can be an excellent tool for breaking out of that educational model. Wikis require collaboration and make explicit the student's engagement with the published 'canon'. Blogs teach that lesson on the large scale as the student's outbound links (and inbound replies) form a broader discursive hypertext; wikis teach the lesson on the local level as students edit what becomes a consensual text, refactoring their own work, and developing their own local canon.