Congress Abandons WikiConstitution
September 28, 2005 | Issue 41•39
WASHINGTON, DC—Congress scrapped the open-source, open-edit, online version of the Constitution Monday, only two months after it went live. "The idea seemed to dovetail perfectly with our tradition of democratic participation," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said. "But when so-called 'contributors' began loading it down with profanity, pornography, ASCII art, and mandatory-assault-rifle-ownership amendments, we thought it might be best to cancel the project." Congress intends to restore the Constitution to its pre-Wiki format as soon as an unadulterated copy of the document can be found. (Copyright The Onion, Inc. All rights reserved).
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One of my most favorite web/news sites The Onion, recently publish the above "article" parodying the notion of a wiki-based constitution.
Quite an ingeneous thought when you think about it.
It also reminds me of a similar argument: allowing learners to define their own learning objectives.
George Siemens notes in his weblog (re: learner-defined objectives):
the designer includes required competencies in the creation of the learning ecology. Instead of designing courses, we need to design learning environments.
In many ways, the Constitution could be thought of as a well-designed learning ecology. It was designed in such a way that both fosters required competencies (e.g., the Bill of Rights) and allows for discussion, interpretation, and amendations (i.e., an active, evolving, ecological system). It is THE environment that all U.S. citizens exist within, subject to its definitions and peculiarities.
Fortunately or unfortunately, citizens must elect others to "write" the wikiConstitution, otherwise the Onion story above might actually ring true.
Perhaps once the United States 2.0 is invented, we'll have the opportunity.
Keywords: George Siemens, learning ecologies, learning environments, learning objectives, The Onion, U.S. Constitution, wikis
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