http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/39184.html

Full story at: http://jondron.cofind.net:80/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1384

I've extolled the virtues of Slashdot before, but it bears repeating. I am still amazed by things like this - a question that interests many web developers and web masters is answered by many individuals in many different ways, then Slashdot uses the crowd to take care of the rest, quite literally evolving (in a strongly Darwinian sense) a dynamic and adaptive learning resource of extraordinarily high quality. Better still, if you don't like the shape of that resource, you can tune it more precisely to your needs, altering thresholds, adjusting weightings according to your belief in the person posting, using value tags in the moderation drop-down box and so on, which in turn contributes to the overall shape and value of the resource to others. This goes notably beyond scrutable user models. And of course, to top it off, you can contribute yourself and/or ask questions of the crowd-teacher which, if they are half-way sensible, are likely to be answered promptly and helpfully. This is social constructivism at its best.

Slashdot is one of the most elegant, highly evolved learning environments on the Web and it works without a teacher in charge and without the explicit top-down enforcement of styles and standards of Wikipedia. Remarkable.
Created:Mon, 29 Dec 2008 10:34:59 GMT