The StudyPlace Project was created to address a simple, but central question: What Educates? Unlike other research projects, we don't expect to find the answer. We do, though, hope to push the boundaries of our ignorance by addressing the fullness of the question. To better understand our approach, let's talk a little bit about the StudyPlace Wiki and the idea of a digital commons.

Traditionally, commons have been used to share property within a community; pooling resources and effort to improve the common good and welfare. Parks, roads, libraries, and town squares are all part of a traditional commons. A digital commons brings this concept to the digital domain: a community collaborates to pool valuable information and knowledge resources. Each member has responsibilities and all members share in the value created.

StudyPlace is a digital commons, created by scholars, educators, students, and others who have a shared concern about what educates. To understand our idea of the commons and how we build it, we might contrast the idea of peer review with peer production.

Peer review is the traditional academic process where elite members of a discipline decide which ideas and opinions merit recognition within their specialized field. Peer production is quite different. It describes the ability for large scale collaborative projects to take place within a decentralized, relatively flat hierarchy, outside of traditional market incentives.

Put more plainly, peer production allows people to create something like Linux or Wikipedia without getting paid to do it and without needing a boss to set their schedule or evaluate their work.

To address our question, we need the peers of peer production, not peer review. We need to understand the experiences of people in their own educative processes and settings.

Now let's talk a little bit about how StudyPlace works. StudyPlace is a wiki — running on the same software that powers Wikipedia. The defining characteristics of a wiki are that anyone can edit and create pages, it's easy to create links between pages, and the history of each page and every edit is preserved and available.

These are important features for our task of creating a digital commons. The openness of the system invites contributions from diverse members with diverse sets of ideas.

The links between pages enable a network effect where the contributions of each individual become more valuable as others contribute, building a dense, rich web of knowledge and ideas.

Because we are operating outside of both market forces and peer review, the transparency of the wiki software helps to establish social responsibility and norms for individuals while providing a means for readers to evaluate the validity and usefulness of a work.

As the final part of our tour, let's take a look at the current state of StudyPlace. The commons grows organically, eclectically. We feature scholarly essays, such as the "Educational Legacies of the French Enlightenment", "21st Century Habits of Mind", and "On (Not) Defining Education".

We have forums to investigate and debate current issues in education, such as the Tough Choices or Tough Times report released last year or the developing section on the One Laptop Per Child project.

We support varied resources for students and researchers, ranging from articles about leading thinkers in education to collaboratively annotated lists of foreign language learning resources on the web.

StudyPlace also backs several courses, looking for new ways to use digital technologies to foster study and learning. The Digital Studio for the study of history and education, for example, incorporates aspects of art and architecture studio pedagogies into a social science agenda, combining self-paced study, with communal goals and critiques.

For StudyPlace to grow and to thrive, we need your help. So I'd like to invite you to join the site and help us build the digital commons.