By Eric Rabkin, The Network Cisco
Sometimes the best inventions happen by accident. One of the world’s great storehouses of biological knowledge is the Animal Diversity Web. In 1995, University of Michigan biology professor Philip Myers decided to use the new medium of the World Wide Web to engage his students in producing the textbook he thought his course needed but did not exist. The tasks of researching, writing, checking, and posting information about animal species and their habitats could, Myers reasoned, not only teach students about animal diversity but also help them better understand the science involved. He was right. What he had not foreseen, however, was that ADW would spawn a set of overlapping worldwide communities. Today over half a million users consult ADW each month, many engage not only in borrowing from this crowd-sourced resource but augmenting it. It serves as a key tool in elementary and secondary education in schools worldwide and motivates research in over 50 universities and colleges. ADW continues to grow and has created whole new studies in how one learns and teaches. Myers’s success went well beyond the walls of his university.
http://newsroom.cisco.com/feature-content?type=webcontent&articleId=1146140
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