(2017-07-02) Caulfield Minimum Viable Public Project

Mike Caulfield: Minimum Viable Public Project. We wanted the students to do public writing.

We bought one big Pinboard account for the class. We emailed the creator of Pinboard, the incomparable Maciej Cegłowski and asked him if it was OK to let everyone use the account (he said yes). We paid about $9 for a lifetime account (it was 2014). And then we asked the students each week to find a substantial article about public policy (either a journal article or a multipage press treatment) and write a summary of it, and post that summary as a social bookmark.

they loved it

I wish I’d rolled out more social bookmarking classes

I’m getting back into Pinboard as a kind of Twitter replacement for finding articles

The project had the students learn through the important practice of summary, and the teacher said the students had really grasped the material much better because of this activity

put it up here on the blog now now, because it strikes me we cover the massive things, whether Digipo or blogging clusters or federated wiki, and don’t share the simple solutions quite as much.