Wiki Notes

The Wiki Notes project is an attempt at open sourcing my own, personal education. While universities like MIT attempt to open source education by making available university lectures, curricula, and syllabi, no attempt that I know have has been made in the opposite direction, that is, to open source student notes.

About
The Wiki Notes project will endeavor to represent an open sourcing of education from the perspective of the student, not the teacher. To this end, all of the notes collected here will not necessarily strictly follow the lectures, discussions, writings, or other pedagogic structures of education, but will reinterpret the information.

The project will likely begin as the notes of a single university student, Zachary McCune, publishing his notes from classes at Brown University.

It will hopefully then expand to include many perspectives at many institutions.

Why a Wiki?
Or perhaps the question should be, why not a live blog? The reason, is that wikis are more participatory than blogs, and allow the facilitation of discussions in addition to changes/additions to the page itself.

Also, wikis allow for easy and dynamic linking, allowing individuals to employ both external links (using wikipedia's entry to define a country, or the Oxford English Dictionary to define a word) and internal links, where individuals will be encouraged to come up with their own entries/definitions for certain terms.

Education by Construction
What is learning if not the construction of systems of knowledge? Not to tread too heavily upon the toes of Foucault and Bordieu, but education is almost always as much about mastering the structure of education as the substance one is being taught. To that end, the construction of a formal system (as in the development of a wiki for material being mastered) allows an individual to parse out important concepts, individuals, and ideas, and structure them in such a way as to be both helpful as a point of reference and as an exercise in the construction of systems of meaning.

Similar Ideas
|The Final Club

|Wiki Notes

|This Guy

|WikiNotes (an offline text app)

=The Notes=


 * Brown University