The feature I think I like with Wiki though is the idea that, if someone reads a page and has a question / doesn’t know something, they can easily create a new page linked to this word, and hope someone will come along and fill it in!

I think Wikis need a form of community discipline or culture - when do you alter, when do you add - however the exploration of multiple views rather than “the owner of the document rules” could be fun.

Sali

Well, there’s an assumption there that is incorrect, that open source is all about working for free. That’s not true. Many programs work on open source projects for a variety of reasons, some of which are financial, just not with the direct, high paying, financial return a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs would be looking for. It’s much closer to why people teach. Why do people teach for the income they receive?

Steven Weber, in The Succes of Open Source, lists a number of motivations why open source developers write open source code:

*Art and beauty
*Job as vocation
*The joint enemy
*Ego boosting
*Reputation
*Identity and belief systems

Sounds like teaching
But the main point I wanted to make was that if you want to make collaboration work, then the first step is moving toward a truly “open text,” one that recognizes what “openness” is, through copyleft/open source licensing. Copyright, to reference Weber again, is about the “right to exclude.” Open source, the “right to distribute,” and I would add, about the right to create and collaborate. It is within a free culture, to reference Lessig again as Will did, that collaboration really happens because we begin to deny ownership of our texts, and instead value contribution to community more, and within that free culture, creativity through reworking of texts and working together is invited, rather than a taboo where one must seek or have permission to work or use the “author’s” text. This is why weblogs and wikis are indeed creating more “open texts” (although, I don’t like that term because it is a bastardization of open source principles), because they exist within a community discourse which is highly connected (not the other way around) and many of the participants are those that seek a free culture.

And minimal CreativeCommons licenses which only allow copies aren’t enough. To believe utterly in collaboration is to enable collaboration completely by allowing derivative works. To do otherwise, is to assert authorial control, to end up with texts that are partially closed, where potential collaborators must ask to work with the text. This is why wikis are much more open content (better term than open text), because they invite the same level of collaboration that open source development does. The writer must surrender some/all authorial control in order to participate in a wiki. . . .

Hope that made sense

However, enough pessimism. Even if the new literacy never overtakes traditional literacy, as teachers I think it is good to promote open text styles of writing and to teach the value of collaboration at the level of granularity where it really does become impossible to say which part was yours and which part is mine. But getting grade-driven students to buy into this idea is tricky. I’d appreciate any ideas on how to do that!