[Oww-Feedback] High School science project linkage? (from Scott Tousley)

[Bill F]

Scott,

Thanks for your interest as well as your specific question. We have
discussed this. I have 12 and 15 year old kids myself: this as a really
important direction for me as well.

The spirit (tao?) of OWW is generally in finding something you want to do
then jumping in and doing it. As we grow out the community of folks using
lab notebooks and generally commenting on not just which protocols they use
but also on how they're using them, the raw material for creating a context
for more focused efforts, such as exposing high school students to research,
becomes more plentiful.

Of course, the same can be said of the web in general. But the proximity of
your data to that of a lot of other similarly intentioned people doing
related  work really can move things forward. We see this with the IGEM
teams who do their work here, for example.

Rather than saying we're going to focus on high school students, I'd say
that we're interested in working with people who want to service that
sub-community within OWW. Not to be pedantic, but in OWW, we aspire to make
it all about growing out the community of collaborating researchers.

I do a lot of the development work on OWW. If there are specific tools that
could help in this area, please let me know.

I hope this doesn't sound like an attempt to shrug off a great suggestion.
Rather, consider this an offer to discuss what would be required as well as
how we could position ourselves over time to serve this community. From a
group with limited resources and a LOT of competing demands, we do our best.
If we can fit things in or assist you in community-building activities, get
in touch.

I'd encourage you to join OWW and post about this within the site. See if
you can find other people who want to work toward the same goals. Unlike
Wikipedia (which uses similar software), there are few pages where you are
competing to put forward your interpretation of a term. For the most part,
we offer a great platform for collaboration. The data connecting out members
together is what we are!


Thanks.

Bill Flanagan
OpenWetWare.org
Department of Biology, MIT




On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 1:14 PM, OpenWetWare Feedback Form on OpenWetWare <
feedback at openwetware.org> wrote:

> Have you thought about setting up a subset area specifically for high
> school science project programs?
> These next generations are heavily social network oriented, and
> OpenWetWare might make HS science project efforts stronger, by enabling
> students to get help laterally and not just from their teachers/parents.
>
> Scott Tousley
> MITRE
> stousley at mitre.org
> tousleys at aol.com
>
> (lorrie at openwetware.org)
> _______________________________________________
> Oww-Feedback mailing list
> Oww-Feedback at mit.edu
> http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-feedback
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/oww-feedback/attachments/20080422/e0d94ec7/attachment.htm