Dear Pedro,
While I can respect your motive in wanting to share AACORN with
your students, bringing hundreds of people to the table is quite
opposite to the intention of AACORN. The ethos of the community has
been to grow slowly, and in each case, everyone who joins the
community (yourself among us) was introduced by someone who knew the
new member personally. Everyone here is part of a community to which
she or he has made an artistic or conceptual contribution.
Size will not improve the conversation. One of our problems may
be that we grew too big without growing the conversation. At one point
we thought we needed to grow. There are lists where critical mass
occurs at 600 or 800. Perhaps we need to grow more. Perhaps not. A
list can grow so large that people lose the sense of community. The
conversation dries up.
As I see it, we have no reason to invite hundreds of students to
join the AACORN network. If we all bring all of our students in, we
could add 50,000 members overnight. I'd rather see us develop a rich
conversation. So far, we have not managed to do so -- adding a hundred
or ten thousand voices won't help us to do this.
If you want to share the conversation with an audience of
students, you can do so without opening AACORN to hundreds of new
members. The AACORN list maintains a public, visible archive at
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/aacorn.html
I hope this does not seem discouraging, but my original question
stands: what purpose will a wiki serve for the AACORN community of 230
people who participate now, and not very actively.
Yours,
Ken
Dear Ken,
Your point is well taken.
I, personally, have a reason to wish for a wiki... Then I can share
AACORN with my students, hundreds of them...
Yours,
Pedro
Pedro David Pérez
Lecturer
Department of Applied Economics and Management
Cornell University
203 Warren Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853
Phone: 607-255-4697
Fax: 607-255-9984
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