A new high-tech take on school group project

The Boston Globe reports:

Israeli business school professor Sheizaf Rafaeli hated seeing his students shell out money for expensive, outdated textbooks. So he let them write one themselves.

He put up an old textbook he published about information systems on a wiki and required his class to make updates. By the end of the term, not only was his textbook more current and comprehensive, his students didn't pay a dime -- and those who updated frequently scored better on exams.

Rafaeli's book is an example of how wikis could change classrooms from the ground up, a topic at the Wikimania conference this weekend at Harvard Law School, where Rafaeli's work will be presented to wiki enthusiasts and academics from around the world.

``Students like the notion of knowledge being malleable, evolving, and actually living through their work," Rafaeli said. ``They discover to their surprise that at the end of the semester, the textbook is very different from what it was at the beginning."

Rafaeli added that wikis are useful for distance learning, because he teaches at the University of Haifa and students can't attend classes regularly during the ongoing conflict with Hezbollah militants in Lebanon.

The bricks and mortar university may have some competition.