I agree that they’re different things, but can’t articulate exactly why very well yet, beyond the “curriculums need measurable learning objectives, articles don’t” one.

With the greatest of respect, developing educational curriculum bears as much resemblance to writing Wikipedia articles as developing real software bears to writing spreadsheet macros.

– a

I believe that great educational software needs contributions from a lot of people, each with expertise in different things.

Wikipedia has found that the lower the barriers to entry the faster you will accumulate useful edits and additions. They have found that low barriers to entry also leads to high levels of useless and vandalising additions. The solution they found is to improve the tools for ensuring useless edits are quickly deleted. This has proved highly effective.

The areas with the big highly publicised problems are subjects which are inherently controversial with strongly diverging views. Even there they have managed to achieve astonishing levels of consensus by having a clear goal against which all contributions can be measured.

Less controversial areas have ended up being owned, in practice, by a small group of editors who groom and tend their area. Even there however the principal of being open to all seems to have been useful.

Similar tools should work for an educational materials development wiki.

I can see a role for education authorities to fork this wiki to produce a static version – this years curriculum – but I believe the static versions will grow more slowly and they will regularly be updated from the more open version.

Looking at MELs post again I see it is about software development, not learning materials development. Maybe different rules apply – I’m afraid I don’t know enough about software development to comment. Remember however that some (high level scripting) software will effectively become learning materials – any code the students are asked to edit – and should be treated as learning materials.

Joe