I found this little story from Mark Zuckerberg in Jeff Jarvis’ new book What Would Google Do?

At Davos, Mark told the story of an art class he took at Harvard. He was busy starting Facebook and didn’t have time to attend the class or study. The final exam was a week away and he was worried about flunking. So he went to the Internet and downloaded images of all the art that he knew would be on the exam (not sure how he knew that – Jeff leaves that part out). He puts them all up on a web page and adds blank boxes under each of them. Then he emails the web page to all of his classmates and tells them he just put up a study guide. The class responds by marking up the page, editing each other, and getting it perfect. Zuckerberg aces the exam, of course, but also the professor told him that the entire class had done much better than usual on the exam.

I had a similar experience in the Intro To Public Relations class at RMIT. Each week we had to visit the discussion forum and either post or respond to an example of PR that we had seen. It kept us engaged between classes and was really interesting because it was based on real current examples that we were seeing in the world. There was some really good discussion about a huge range of topics, and each week we spent the first 20 minutes of the class going over what happened online. 

There are two parts that could have been improved. First we were using an antique piece of forum software that didn’t have any form of notifications. I want to get an email when somebody replies to me, otherwise it is very hard to find it and keep current. The other is that at the end of the semester (and the semester before us) the forum had been wiped clean – all that knowledge had been thrown away. That seems kinda ironic for a university, we really should be further developing what already exists instead of starting again right? We don’t throw the libraries books out every 6 months! 

Like the music industry, academia seems to be limiting itself with concerns about copyright and that is limiting the potential for some really cool stuff in the future.

By Ross Hill - May 19th, 2009 at 9:43am with 806 views - mark zuckerberg rmit