Education should be dvolnoy!

    All web technologies that are currently at the peak of popularity can and should be applied to the field of education. Open free hosting for lecture slides, abstracts, theses and other materials should make a real revolution, comparable to the advent of Wikipedia. The ability to comment on all materials, thematic educational blogs and freely distributed testing systems
    can take education technology to a new level.

    Within the framework of the CSIN · RU project, our team will study the applicability of Web 2.0 ideas in the field of university education in computer science. Already now we have a gallery of leading computer scientists, a number of courses have been posted, a thematic blog and a social catalog are being maintained.

    How do we imagine education 2.0 and what is our plan?


    Goals. Our main goal is to create an infrastructure that will make educational materials reusable . That is, so that a lecture prepared and read once can be studied / viewed millions of times. Every day we lose the enormous labor of teachers who, having prepared slides of lectures, forget them forever in their home computers . Right now, only MIT OpenCourseWare is trying to do something like this. We want to do better!

    Motivation.Commenting, rating, recommending and freely distributing educational content will create competition between teachers. When the content of competing courses is in sight and it becomes possible to compare courses among themselves, we will immediately see what kind of university it is worth. Ideally, any competition leads to an improvement in quality and a fall in the price of the object of competition.

    Difficulties. First of all, it is necessary to overcome the inertia of the authors of educational materials. It is one thing to give a lecture to 15 students, and another to hang your (not perfect) slides on public display. The situation with copyright is not clear either - universities may try to hinder the distribution of lectures by their employees.

    Business model.At the first stage, the most relevant Wikipedia model is the collection of donations and the search for grants. At the second stage, when technologies have already been created and pilot projects have shown their effectiveness, it will be possible to attract investors. Finally, with the accumulation of a critical mass of content and active users, the project can be sold to one of the largest media companies or reached a payback through advertising.

    Education 3.0 The Idea of ​​the Semantic Web - Search by Meaning. Like other types of content, educational materials are gradually moving from a central collection point, to a series of competing projects, and finally to a decentralized system of millions of participants. At the last stage, you will need to develop an annotation and metadata format (like RSS for blogs) that will allow you to conduct an educational searchand individual selection of training materials.

    CSIN plan. In the spring of 2007 , free hosting for lecture slides and electronic abstracts will be opened on CSIN · RU . We are also going to launch a publication system on topical issues (leave or stay, search for grants, the fate of science, business models for education, paid or free). Naturally, the forum, personal pages of project participants, tags for all objects on the site, RSS-export of new materials. May Drupal help us!

    Feedback. Any further discussion of the concept of “Education 2.0” brings us closer to the future of free education. We need your ideas: how else can you apply Web 2.0 to education? How to make a CSIN project · RUit's better? Do you have friends who will be allowed to post their slides on our website? How to attract investment in education 2.0?

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