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Sharing Information

Why is it that when we're in school we write long papers that are only seen by the teacher/professor?

I'm currently writing out my personal view of how to teach all the different ages in the church to grow a deeper relationship with God.  It's a paper stating my personal philosophy based on my experience and what I've learned in class.  What I wouldn't give to see what everyone else wrote as well to find things which I might have missed or ideas I hadn't considered.

Why do we write papers that are essentially for ourselves and no one else?  How hard would it be to set-up some group which publicly shares the papers written for a class?

Peace,
+Tom

Comments

Anonymous said…
Tom, if your class is at VTS, most classes have a on-line blackboard vehicle to post syllabi, notes, etc. You might check to see if 1) that's available, and 2) if the class would be willing to share their thoughts with one another so you all might teach/learn from each other. It may be dependent upon who is teaching the class and whether or not they are technically savvy.
Tom said…
David,

Thanks for that. I was thinking about Blackboard as I wrote the post as well. I think what I was really looking for was a more public method. Some place where I could say, show me all the school papers written about X, or drill down to the specific class.

Once you see the papers on a given topic people could even comment on them and begin a discussion on the topic.

The problem, of course, is how to deal with plagiarism.
Anonymous said…
I think it's a good idea to share papers. When I was in high school, we passed papers around all the time.

Now, I'm sure some English papers or History, people might not care what someone else wrote. But, the paper you are specifically talking about - that would be interesting to see what other people said. Is there any discussion? Maybe if peopel don't want to actually let you read their paper, there could be a class discussion on their ideas.

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