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Why Teachers Don't Share...

This paper by Greg Webb (Open Training and Education Network, OTEN, New South Wales, Australia) is from 2000, but has always been hanging out in my bookmarks.

Read more and see what Greg says about Why teachers don't share resources, and what we can do about it .

I suggest some of the reasons teachers don't share include:


* Lack of quality

* Fear of being judged by peers

* Loss of intellectual property

* Inequity

* Loss of power

What is even more interested about this paper is a little known technology from WebOrganic known as Pageseeder-- it allows readers of this paper to embed threaded discussion comments directly into the part of the paper they are commenting on- very different from reading a paper and going to a discussion board; this places the discussion right in the context of the paper.

Maybe this a sort of publishing paradigm David Wiley was recently alluding to?

Anyhow, Greg finds a nice parable in a story:

"After conquering a local tyrant, a village decided to put on a big shindig to celebrate their new freedom. Every villager agreed to bring two skins of their best wine, which would all be poured into a great vat to symbolize the unity with which they fought. One villager (every village has at least one) was the stingy sort, who decided to put water in his skins instead of wine, calculating that the dilution would go unnoticed. As the entire village stood in line, emptying their skins of wine into the vat, he made sure no one discovered his plot.



"Finally came the evening of the great shindig. As the villagers gathered with their tankards around the vat, the newly appointed leader gave a speech that inspired one and all. Finally, the villagers suggested that the leader be first to fill his tankard from the vat, and the leader happily agreed.



"When the leader placed his tankard under the vat and turned forth the flow of wine, he was surprised to find his glass was filled with clear water."

Of course, this village would have had no problem if they had an RSS feed on the wine vat ;-)

June 5, 2003
Just stumbled across this nice little web gadget for providing in context commenting. Quick Doc Review:

gives you an instant private space for gathering comments on any HTML document (Microsoft Word documents too). Your group can comment on each paragraph, using QuickTopic's easy private forum. Comments are all in one central place. Much better than mailing documents around and consolidating feedback. And it's private, but still easy to access.
You can start your document review in about one minute. It's even easier for your readers -- they don't have to register or sign in.

See an example