People who read this blog know I’ve been talking about Water106 for a while and about the possibility of applying a ds106 model to an issues-based course for even longer.

For those that haven’t been following the idea as it has been developed, however, I’ve written up a whitepaper, suitable for sharing with faculty or administration that you might want to rope into the project. It covers the story up to now, and I think renders the reasoning behind it more comprehensible.

I will say that the more I work on this, the more excited I get. Part of that excitement is that we are not only educating students, but modeling a way of working together cooperatively that students can bring into the workplaces they head off to (or the ones they currently work at). This is, of course, true of ds106 and cMOOCs as well, I’ve just never designed a networked learning project of this magnitude. Instead of preparing students for business, we’re preparing students to change business.

Anyway, take the time to read the whitepaper linked below if you’re interested. It looks like a lot of pages, but it’s really mostly screenshots.