I was intrigued, so I read the linked article on how politics is "derailing attempts to get anything done about improvments in materials and course work."
The linked article is about altering the school curriculum to be more heavily science and math based, while sacrificing studies in arts, languages, and health. If you feel that such a change is undeniably an improvement, then I do not think that you are seeing both sides of the issue.
My understanding of the proposal is that Algebra II will be required for students to attend any publicly funded post-secondary institution (even in an arts program)... which in my opinion is a bad idea. I know people who have been incredibly successful in science at a graduate level, but could not have completed algebra II.
Many people have commented that Usenet is superior to forums as an information repository. However, by my understanding Usenet is very similar to forums but with different underlying technology. Can anyone identify why Usenet is superior, or preferred?
The responses thus far have been very helpful, so thank you. I'd like to do a bit of a summary and try to focus some of the discussion:
It seems that wikis are the prefered source of information (with some exceptions), but at the same time most people feel that wikis are not competing with forums at all. This seems to be related to the fact that wikis are predictive while forums are responsive. Forums are where the information is created, but the created information is in an inconvenient format for consumption... so Wikis are preferred (though not necessary) as a more permanent storehouse of useful information. One issue that was lightly touched on was that forums are not easily scaled. This leads to admins having to repeatedly re-organize a forum to keep it from becoming over-populated or under-populated. One piece of interesting feedback is that "members dont mind the refreshes", which I find very surprising. Related to forums' lack of scalability is the rigid heirarchical structure of information in a forum, which is in contrast with a wiki's network-link structure. Naturally, there are many ways to heirarchically structure the same information (by topic, by geography, by time), but a forum is forced to commit to only one. Does anyone have any experience or opinions related to these perceived shortcomings? Anecdotes pertaining to these would be especially helpful.
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I was intrigued, so I read the linked article on how politics is "derailing attempts to get anything done about improvments in materials and course work."
The linked article is about altering the school curriculum to be more heavily science and math based, while sacrificing studies in arts, languages, and health. If you feel that such a change is undeniably an improvement, then I do not think that you are seeing both sides of the issue.
My understanding of the proposal is that Algebra II will be required for students to attend any publicly funded post-secondary institution (even in an arts program)... which in my opinion is a bad idea. I know people who have been incredibly successful in science at a graduate level, but could not have completed algebra II.
Many people have commented that Usenet is superior to forums as an information repository. However, by my understanding Usenet is very similar to forums but with different underlying technology. Can anyone identify why Usenet is superior, or preferred?
The responses thus far have been very helpful, so thank you. I'd like to do a bit of a summary and try to focus some of the discussion:
It seems that wikis are the prefered source of information (with some exceptions), but at the same time most people feel that wikis are not competing with forums at all. This seems to be related to the fact that wikis are predictive while forums are responsive. Forums are where the information is created, but the created information is in an inconvenient format for consumption... so Wikis are preferred (though not necessary) as a more permanent storehouse of useful information.
One issue that was lightly touched on was that forums are not easily scaled. This leads to admins having to repeatedly re-organize a forum to keep it from becoming over-populated or under-populated. One piece of interesting feedback is that "members dont mind the refreshes", which I find very surprising.
Related to forums' lack of scalability is the rigid heirarchical structure of information in a forum, which is in contrast with a wiki's network-link structure. Naturally, there are many ways to heirarchically structure the same information (by topic, by geography, by time), but a forum is forced to commit to only one.
Does anyone have any experience or opinions related to these perceived shortcomings? Anecdotes pertaining to these would be especially helpful.